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JAVID GADIROV
intended by considering perceived intentions of other individuals, or events, and
facts, their prior intentions nevertheless remain individual.
FOLLOWING PAROCHIAL LAW
Crimes against humanity are not a mafia situation writ large. International
criminal law replaces the issue of whether there is an “intent to do wrong” with
focus on shared or collective intent. However, multitude of perpetrators and
coordinated or even organized nature of their activity is also a feature or ‘ordinary’
crime. What makes crimes in question distinct, is that perpetrators, such as the
communist judge, Auschwitz bookkeeper or Taliban executioner reinterpret their
acts as lawful and right in an unusual sense of these words.
For a communist judge may perceive that he is acting according to “new law
and new ethical norms”. Just as an Auschwitz bookkeeper who though that his
actions were part of war, to such judge an execution of political opponent or even
terrorism could be an act of civil war or revolution.*® Needless to say, for Taliban
executioner enforcement of divine eternal moral order and law could be a primary
reason or explanation of executions.
Of course, we need not agree as to whether what they mean as law is an acceptable
account or a concept of law. The possibility of fundamental disagreement about what
amounts to law is elucidated by Dworkin, who points that “lawyers and judges do
disagree... about what the law really is...”, that is they have theoretical disagreement
about “grounds of law”.?”? Dworkin furthermore argues that we do not follow shared
rules and criteria for the word “law”, and that accounts which presuppose existence of
such criteria are “semantic theories of law”.?* Semantic theories may disagree about
content of such criteria, but they “hold a certain picture of what disagreement is like
and when it is possible”, and condition arguments about what is law on accepting
and following “the same criteria for deciding when our claims are sound”.”
Raz disagrees with Dworkin as to whether it is impossible to provide a
semantic account of law,*° and indicates that ‘criterial explanations’ of law “are
26 Consider e.g., Trotsky, who explains that “under conditions of civil war, the assassination of
individual oppressors ceases to be an act of individual terror” and that “Moral evaluations,
together with those political, flow from the inner needs of struggle...”, Leon Trotsky, Their
Morals and Ours The New International (1938), www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/
morals/morals.htm.
7 Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1986, 4.
28 Dworkin, Law’s Empire, 31-32.
2° Dworkin, Law’s Empire, 33, 35, 45.
30 Joseph Raz, Two Views of the Nature of the Theory of Law: A Partial Comparison Legal
Theory 4 (1998), 258.
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