W&L law professor Mark Drumbl‘s book Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy, which published earlier this year, encourages a second look at how we think about child soldiers, and what effective rehabilitation and reintegration means for them. In the last week of October 2012, he lectured on the book at Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of London. The presentations connected the arguments in the book with major recent events, such as the Kony2012 video and judgments of international courts to convict and sentence high-profile defendants on charges of unlawful conscription, enlistment, or use of child soldiers. You can listen to Professor Drumbl’s Cambridge lecture here. The Oxford lecture is available here.
Professor Drumbl has written about these recent events in journals, blogs (here and here), and he has also spoken about them in you tube format. Reimagining Child Soldiers has received positive initial review, including on the Lawfare blog. Its first chapter has been translated into German for separate publication in Germany.
In September 2012, Prof. Drumbl spoke and chaired a panel discussion at a major conference held in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, convened to discuss the Tenth Anniversary of the International Criminal Court. He also participated in an on-line symposium on the question whether atrocity perpetrators who spare some group members should have that factor considered in mitigation of sentence. His comments are here.
Professor Drumbl was recently appointed to the Advisory Committee on Global Engagement of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). The mandate of this committee is to present to the AALS Executive Committee a new approach to the internationalization of legal education in light of the changing demands on the legal profession.
In September Professor Drumbl presented a work-in-progress at an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Melbourne (Australia) entitled the Passions of International Law. A paper he had previously presented at the Melbourne Law School, “Germans are the Lords and Poles are the Servants”: the Trial of Arthur Greiser in Poland, 1946 will be published as a chapter in a volume put out by Oxford University Press entitled Untold Stories: The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials in early 2013. The Greiser trial is the first trial for the crime of waging aggressive war brought in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Professor Drumbl’s article The Curious Criminality of Mass Atrocity, which was initially presented in June 2012 in a conference in Amsterdam, will appear as a chapter in a book under contract with Oxford University Press. Another article ‘She Makes Me Ashamed to Be a Woman’: The Genocide Conviction of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 2011, will appear in the Michigan Journal of International Law in 2013. Professor Drumbl also contributed to the to the Official French Commentary to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Université de Paris, 2011, http://www.commentaire-cpi.com/), a piece entitled La CPI et les victimes d’atrocités.
Mark Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor at Washington & Lee University, School of Law, where he also serves as Director of the University’s Transnational Law Institute.
