Crimes Against the Sovereign Order: Rethinking International Criminal Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The scope of international criminal jurisdiction poses a fundamental challenge for criminal law theory. Prevailing justifications for the state’s authority to punish crime assume the existence of connections between the state and either the criminal or the crime. However, such connections are not required in the international criminal law context, where individuals can be tried before the courts of foreign states that are unconnected to the offense, or before international tribunals. Acknowledging this gap in existing criminal law theory requires us to identify the characteristic that distinguishes international crimes from domestic ones and to consider whether that distinction can justify the unusual authority of non-nexus institutions to punish international criminals. Without a convincing answer to this question, we must consider whether the core structure of our international criminal justice framework — universal and international punishment — is illegitimate. This article introduces a new theory of what distinguishes international crimes from domestic crimes and justifies the unusual scope of international criminal jurisdiction, grounded in the history of the field. What we have defined as international crime has changed dramatically over the course of recent centuries; as the article demonstrates, since the late eighteenth century, there have been three distinct periods, each defined by a focus on a different archetype of international offense. However, these were not isolated changes. Throughout the three eras of international criminal law, international society has been structured as a legal order of sovereign states — or a sovereign order — which itself has undergone a series of significant transitions. The changes in international crime relate to changes in the nature of the sovereign order in a significant way. Specifically, the paradigmatic international offenses emblematic of each era violated the organizing principles around which the system of sovereign states was structured in each period. What ultimately distinguishes international crimes from domestic ones is that international crimes undermine the ordering of international society into a system of sovereign states. Tracing this connection between international offenses and these organizing principles also points to a potential link to domestic criminal law theories that justify criminal punishment on the basis that state authority to punish is necessary to secure the rule of law within the domestic realm. Likewise, international criminal punishment might be justified on the basis that securing the existence of a system of states is required to create the global conditions necessary to secure the rule of law within each state.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".