ABSTRACT
The great Cambridge historian and student of international relations, Sir Herbert Butterfield, was fond of remarking that most wars throughout history have not been contests between right and wrong, but clashes “between one half-right that was too willful and another half-right that was too proud.” The animating spirit behind this legal enterprise is seemingly at odds with the Butterfieldian emphasis on the universality of the lust for power and the consequent falsity of making absolute rather than relative judgments on a state’s resort to violence. In many ways this differentiation, and the attitudes underlying it, are similar to the efforts of domestic legal systems to define certain acts as crimes which the law will not tolerate and for which it will hold responsible those agents who commit them. Argentina did not avail itself of another peaceful method of dispute settlement suggested by the United Nations (UN) Charter: arbitration or recourse to the International Court of Justice.
