A Source-book of Military Law and War-time Legislation

(IV) Effect of War on Contracts and other Relations. This is not in strictness military law, but war law.

(V) Army Organization and Administration. This is what might be called internal military law; i. e., the principles that govern the status of military persons so far as the Legislature and the Courts have formulated and controlled them the remainder of this extensive subject being left for control by regulations of the military authority itself.

(VI) Army Discipline. This represents merely a large but distinctive portion of the foregoing body of rules, and is covered by the Articles of War and the Manual for Courts-Martial.

There remain, of course, the

(VII) Rules for Land Warfare; i. e., for the governance of military persons in their relations with all other persons when conducting military operations in time of war. As these rules of national law are supposed to represent the customs of so-called international law, they are commonly dealt with in books on that subject, and are not covered here.

The present volume, therefore, covers only the first five of the above. topics. Those five represent no scientifically homogeneous group of legal principles, but only those topics of law which affect military persons and others who have relations with them.

4. Part II contains sources for the study of War-Time Law. As this material consists partly of statutes ranging over a variety of topics, no topical division was possible. Both Parts, therefore, were frankly arranged by chronology and by the kinds of sources, rather than by topics; the whole material being divided into Pre-War Legal Sources and War-Time Legal Sources.

This, after all, is more suitable for purposes of study. Part I places the reader in possession of the main outlines (with the Manual for Courts-Martial) of Military Law as we had it before we came into the war. Part II then shows us the main changes introduced by war legislation, into both military law and civil law. Part I alone would have left the student behind the times; Part II would be largely unmeaning without Part I.

In using the book, the last two portions, viz. Federal Judicial Opinions, and Opinions of the Judge Advocate General, may best be used as exercises for applying the entire mass of the preceding material. The selected Opinions of the Judge Advocate General present a series of problems running over almost the whole gamut. There is scarcely a legal principle or a statute that does not come into play in one or another of these opinions. They reflect faithfully the present day aspect of military law in its practical operation.

5. Military Law has of course no intrinsic connection with WarLaw. The latter is simply such alterations of the civil law as are made for the duration of a war. Apart from a few distinctly military topics, e. g., martial law, and land warfare rules, it concerns chiefly the altered legal rules for civil relations. Scientifically it might have no place here.

Why has Part II, on War-Time Legal Sources, been included? Because it is impossible for any lawyer to avoid educating himself in the war-law of to-day, and because it is impracticable to disentangle its military and its civil aspects. Theory here must yield to facts; else it would become pedantry. The facts are that this is a nation in arms; that the war laws have changed parts of both the military law and the civil law; that every department of the Government and every civil interest comes into contact with this war law in both aspects; and that no intelligent lawyer can wish to remain uninformed as to any important part of it. The spirit of the times demanded, therefore, that a volume intended to provide legal materials for study by those who will enter the legal profession on their return from military service should endeavor to keep them abreast of their profession and should introduce them to the general legal atmosphere of war times. No lawyer who is familiar with this material can doubt the compelling propriety of this. The whole drama of the war, in its legal aspect, proceeds across the stage, as we follow the statutes here collected. And the young lawyer-soldier who uses this volume, it is hoped, will find revealed to him, as a soldier, the deep interest of military law, and, as a lawyer, the far-reaching portent of the new war law.

JOHN H. WIGMORE.