THROUGH THE PAST, DARKLY

Criminal law's methods for determining the facts have been transformed by the rise of modern science since the seventeenth century, when the French court trying Jean Calas for murder held that joining many light pieces of evidence together created a grave one, and two grave ones added up to a violent one, at which point questioning the accused under torture was deemed warranted. Yet modern law still constitutes a distinctive system of knowledge that is guided by its own principles for comprehending human behavior. The evidence allowed in a trial regarding the actions and intentions of accused persons is circumscribed with guidelines that steer jurists away from both specialist and nonspecialist (read “commonsense”) forms of knowing into a domain that is uniquely legal. Upon reviewing numerous trials at three international justice institutions, it is apparent that the critiques of domestic law presented at the beginning of this book can also apply to international criminal tribunals. Legal ways of knowing at international tribunals are at times utterly distinctive, as seen in their predilection (especially in leadership cases) for documents over other forms of evidence and witnessing. Not only are documents preferred as sources, but also there exists a hierarchy of documents in which primary documents are accorded greater probative value than secondary documents, and official documents are given more weight than unofficial ones.