Cutler Schershow Scott

This author's articles

• Beyond and Before the Law at Guantanamo

  12 July 2006
  The article explores the status of the Guantanamo detainees and argues that the category of ‘unlawful combatant’ has always been foundational to the laws of war, being applied to ‘spies’ or other irregular participants in an armed conflict. Thus, the predicament of the Guantanamo detainees is ‘the very manifestation of the existing state system and its corollary values’. Critics of Guantanmo cannot rely on international law or in the exercise of sovereignty. The authors’ suggestion is that sovereignty itself must be torqued in a strange reversal, and made to work against itself. Sovereignty must be ‘expended without reserve in the name, not of law, but of justice, to the point where the territory and its boundary tremble’.