This evening, Professor Ohlin, a law professor here at Cornell, led a talk regarding the current event of the Afghan hospital bombing. Essentially what he did was try to teach us how those in law go about thinking of such situations. He relied on audience participation to answer his questions on why this situation could be tried in an international court of law and on what basis a country could or could not be convicted.

What really hit me during this discussion was talking of a ‘reasonable proportion’ of civilian deaths that result from an act of war. Professor Ohlin, who clearly deals with the law every day and is extremely well educated in it and comfortable with it, was talking about this idea of an acceptable amount of civilian deaths as if it was just another piece of information. Nothing against Professor Ohlin at all but the way he talked about this “proportion”, likely due to his familiarity with the subject and the fact that it is common practice in international law as well as my unfamiliarity with it, made me tense up a little bit. The fact that if a number of civilians below or at the allowed proportion are killed is acceptable is an oddity to me. I do understand that it is impossible to commit acts of war without killing civilians in total, but it seems very strange to me that there is an accepted number of civilian deaths that goes along with any attack. I don’t know if that makes me feel safe or comfortable with international law…

Later, Professor Ohlin made a comment regarding outlawing all acts of war. This made me wonder what the world would be like if that were the case. Would we all be at peace, even if it were forced upon us? Or would tensions run even deeper if countries could not assert their dominance? We may never know, but maybe in a society run that way, human deaths would not be a tally in international law, rather a sincere tragedy.