An ACW legal WI- no Lieber Code

Been giving this some thought, and I'm not sure whether Lieber not drafting General Order 100 would have had any significant effect on the development of the law of war, as it was essentially a codification of the then-existing customary law of war. It's also important to remember the context the code was written under.

During the ACW, because most of the personnel were volunteers with little knowledge of military law & customs, or the laws of war, courts-martial and military commissions were fraught with both procedural and substantive errors, such as using the wrong form of tribunal (at the time, courts-martial were for violations of the Articles of War, while military commissions were supposed to try violations of the laws of war & soldiers suspected of committing common-law crimes against civilians in hostile/foreign territory), failures to follow the rules of trial procedure, evidence, and the standards of proof for specified offenses, imposing improper, often grossly excessive sentences, and trying people for the wrong offenses.

The Lieber Code was one of the first attempts to rectify these problems, in this case, by laying out what the laws of war were in a relatively simple and accessible format. However, in the years following the ACW, a number of legal authorities wrote treatises attempting to set out the laws of war and the intricacies of military law in a way that they could be referred to by future courts-martial and be used as textbooks to instruct future military officers in these things in an effort to avoid the debacle of ACW military justice. (The most famous of these treatises was William Winthrop's Military Law and Precedents, first published in 1880.)

Had Lieber not written his code, at least some of the post-ACW legal experts would almost certainly have taken it upon themselves to write a codification of the customary laws of war as part of their work, which likely would have been used in the subsequent development of the law of war. So, the Lieber Code, although an important precedent in the development of the law of war, probably wasn't indispensible to their evolution.
 
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