In memoriam.

• Author: Feliciano, Florentino P.
• Position: Testimonial to late Yale Law School Professor Myres McDougal

It was an act of courage on the part of Myres S. McDougal to undertake, in the 1950s, a book about the law of war. It was the height of the Cold War. Large numbers of nuclear weapons were poised to destroy the United States, the Soviet Union, and much of the rest of humanity. The clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists read two minutes to midnight. Public perception of the danger was acute. School children in the United States were undergoing not the ordinary fire drills, but nuclear attack drills. People were building bomb shelters in their backyards, underneath the barbecue grills.

When we began our study, scholarship on the law of war was almost evenly divided between two camps. One camp, the Realists, assumed that a law of war had become impossible. A very distinguished Belgian jurist, Charles de Visscher, in his influential Theory and Reality in Public International Law, counseled his academic colleagues:

The new weapons of mass destruction have revolutionized all the data of war, and it is above all for this reason that the jurists will be well advised to waste no further time in what some of them still persist in calling the "restatement" of the laws of war. To try to adapt these laws to the new conditions is not only labor absolutely lost; it is an enterprise that in certain of its aspects may be dangerous.... There is better work to be done today than picking up the fragments of an obsolete body of rules.(1) The other camp was composed of equally distinguished and deeply committed, but perhaps somewhat romantic, scholars. These scholars assembled formulations of rules enumerated over the last one and a half centuries and attempted to weave them into a coherent set of propositions that somehow, they hoped, would restrain top political and military leaders and battlefield commanders. Precisely because the issues involved were so important to the future of mankind, Myres McDougal identified this subject for the first of a series of treatises on international law that he was projecting. I had the honor, which I have treasured throughout my life, of being invited to collaborate with him on the project. My preparation was limited. I had read the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the Geneva 1929 Prisoners of War Convention during my undergraduate days in the law school of the University of the Philippines. However, my experience during the belligerent occupation of the Philippines by Japan during the Second World War had not...