Khomeini’s arguments were foundational to the Islamic Republic. The significance of his jurisprudential contributions and innovations cannot be overstated. For the first time, he theorized about direct rule by a faqih. He revolutionized the position of velayat-e faqih by taking it out of the social and cultural realms only and planting it firmly in the domain of politics. First, he made the velayat-e faqih a political supervisor, then a ruler, and finally an absolute ruler. Khomeini gave the absolute ruler the authority to issue injunctions that superseded the injunctions of religion if necessary and empowered him to decide on what was expedient and in the interest of the greater good. These ideas continue to remain foundational to the Islamic Republic. Today, Khomeini the ruler has been all but forgotten. His portraits continue to adorn government buildings, his mausoleum is a frequent stop for visiting dignitaries, and his legacy is duly praised on official occasions and in state ceremonies. But the state has long moved on from what one scholar aptly called “Khomeinism.” From the 1990s on, it has been “Khameneism” that has ruled Iran politically and jurisprudentially, with its own conceptions of velayat-e faqih.

Grotius recast Aristotelian theories of human sociability in terms of self-preservation.Religious war in Europe had undermined the Thomist notion of mutual human affection as a basis for society.If society was established by the need to survive, then justice, which maintained society, must be understood in terms of its contribution to that necessity.Grotius therefore resolved the Ancient Roman and Greek problem of how to reconcile justice and expedience by reinterpreting justice in terms of expedience.For an individual, or state, to act out of self-preservation was necessarily just.His fusion of justice and expedience was one reason he was insistent upon distancing his thought from the Academic Sceptics, such as Carneades, who argued that there was no such thing as justice and that all moral action was expedient.For Grotius, part of the law of self-preservation was the necessity for individuals to secure the means for self-preservation and this meant that the acquisition of property, and trade, were central parts of that process.These principles applied also to the artificial person of the state which found itself in competition for survival with other states.The expansion of the state was therefore justifiable for its preservation.Indeed, following this reasoning, empire effectively became a necessity, and an inevitability, for the survival of European states.

This chapter discusses the legal competence of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. First, the chapter discusses the personal jurisdiction of the Court and the decision to prosecute the crimes that had already been established as legal norms under international law and domestic Sierra Leonean law. The chapter thereafter examines the origin of each of the prosecutable crimes from prior international tribunals, namely crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, and the debates and difficulties that stemmed from using Sierra Leone’s law as the basis for offenses. Second, it analyzes the temporal jurisdiction of the court, while the civil war lasted nearly a decade the temporal jurisdiction of the Special Court only covered a few years in the last part of a ten-year conflict, leaving a large part of atrocities without any prosecutions. Finally, the chapter addresses the Special Court’s prosecutions of all parties to the Sierra Leone conflict, including the controversial government-funded militia, in an attempt to avoid criticism as another “victors justice” court.