Torture, Power, and Law

David Luban is University Professor in Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University. His many publications include Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study (1988), Legal Modernism (1994), Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (2007), and well-known essays on just war theory and international criminal law.

• Preface; Part I. Downgrading Rights and Expanding Power During Post-9/11 Panic: 1. The war on terrorism and the end of human rights; 2. Eight fallacies about liberty and security; Part II. The Ticking Bomb as Moral Fantasy and Moral Fraud: 3. Liberalism, torture, and the ticking bomb; 4. Unthinking the ticking bomb; Part III. The Evils of Torture: 5. A communicative conception of torture; 6. Human dignity, humiliation, and torture; 7. Mental torture: a critique of erasures in US law (with Henry Shue); Part IV. Complicity in Torture: 8. The torture lawyers of Washington; 9. Tales of terror: lessons for lawyers from the war on terrorism; 10. An affair to remember.

'David Luban has written over the past decade an extraordinarily compelling set of philosophical, legal (and simply human) reflections on what has unfortunately become a defining issue - torture. He raises crucial questions not only about the role of lawyers in legitimizing indefensible practices, but also about broader aspects of moral argument, especially the common practice of relying on 'extreme cases' and 'brainteasers' as alternatives to confronting more mundane (and horrific) realities. The book therefore promises to be important even after that happy day when torture has indeed been eliminated from the world.' Sanford Levinson, University of Texas, Austin