Court-Martial: How Military Justice Has Shaped America from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jax186
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Military and Defense Studies
ResumoChris Bray offers a breezy account of how the military has attempted to maintain discipline and outlaw deviance throughout its history. As he concedes in the introduction, the concept of military justice may have an oxymoronic ring to civilian ears. Observers distantly apprehending the legal proceedings (or paucity thereof) at Guantánamo Bay or dismayed by the armed services' lackadaisical punishment of sexual predators may wonder whether justice is accessible through military channels. Bray's outlook is essentially optimistic as he traces the evolution of courts-martial, from the capricious punitiveness typical of earlier eras to procedures that now more closely parallel civilian juridical norms. Aimed at a nonscholarly audience, Court-Martial is conversational in tone and episodic in treatment. Academic readers may regret the book's lack of footnotes, though each chapter contains a short bibliographic essay. More problematic is Bray's unevenness in approach. Brimming with vignettes, Court-Martial is decidedly lopsided in its coverage. The first section, covering the revolutionary era to the 1850s, is the most thoroughly researched and original, drawing on the author's doctoral thesis. In an age of militias, commanding officers' first problem was to determine when a man acted as a private citizen and when he could be considered a soldier and hence liable for court-martial for slanderous speech or insubordinate behavior. As Bray shows, the range of punishable offenses was expansive.
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