Imagining Justice for Syria. By Beth Van Schaack. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv, 476. Index.

Abstract

international law professor also engaged in lawyering as a vocational option that serves the public good while respecting the constraints of professionalism. The fact that most academicians and lawyers tend to follow the money, serve the powerful, and are guardians of the established order is a choice not a matter foreclosed by normal career ambitions. John Dugard’s life story conveys to readers that it is possible to have the satisfactions of an extraordinary career yet “confront” (his word) the starkest evils of the day. I suspect that at some layer of consciousness, natural law precepts inform such a pattern of ethically accountable life choices. Why only a select few are so oriented remains a mystery of the human condition, perhaps attributable to the material lures of modernity, and maybe connected to the frustrating failure to meet other global challenges of our time.