The Validity of the Incidents Genre

Abstract

Intellectual breakthroughs in a field of study often come from persevering in a slightly different way of perceiving reality. And so it is with incidents jurisprudence, introduced by Michael Reisman as "a new genre in the study of international law." It is not new to assess the legal implications of a prominent international occurrence, whether it be a particular cross-border retaliatory raid after allegations of a terrorist attack or the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Instead, what is new here is the identification of the incident itself as the law-shaping event, and the regarding of the incident as a basis for the systematic observation and generalized understanding of international law as a distinctive type of law.