Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. This is Jamie Weinstein. Starting in November, I will be taking over

hosting duties of the Dispatch Podcast on Mondays, but with the world in crisis, I thought I would

pitch in a little bit and try to help add coverage to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.

One question that keeps getting brought up on Twitter is what is international law

is Israel abiding by international law? Who is even in charge of adjudicating what is international

law? To answer this question, I brought in Jeremy Rabkin. He is a professor at George Mason

University Scalia School of Law, where he teaches courses on international law and the law

of armed conflict. He's also the author of books such as Law Without Nations and the Case for

Sovereignty. And 20 years ago, he was my advisor at Cornell University, and with that,

to help us answer the question of what exactly is international law? Here's Jeremy Rabkin.

Professor Jeremy Rabkin, thank you for joining the Dispatch Podcast.

To be with you. Domestic law is kind of intuitively understood. If we get a speeding ticket,

you know, there's a law that we have to pay or we're getting trouble. We do a crime to somebody.

You punch somebody, you're going to deal with a law. International law seems a little bit more

in the air. What exactly is international law? Yes, people keep talking about it.

This is clearly against international law, and you have the sense that you could just look it up

in the code of international law. When you said at the beginning was domestic law was intuitive,

even if it's not intuitive, it's easy to look up. Lawyers who don't have that much sophistication

can find out quickly because we know where to go. International law is a very large collection

of treaties, many of which present questions about how to interpret them, and then there's a certain

body of customary practice, which is of course even harder to look up because it's not recorded in

one place. So people who say confidently, this is against international law, to say terribly,

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