David French
speaker
3,314 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 19 Sep
David French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And they're also the product, not just of hundreds and hundreds of years of hard-earned, hard-learned experience, they're also products really, truly, in the last 100 years,
of the terrible experience of two world wars.
And so a lot of the laws of war are both designed over the course of centuries to make war humane, both for the combatants and for non-combatants, but also they've been developed particularly since World War II to try to block
the emergence of another world war.
So they both, they really both limit human behavior once a war has started, but they're also supposed to strongly limit when wars can start.
And so it's on the front end and on the back end that the law should apply.
Yeah, I mean, this is a really good example.
The Iran war is a really good example of why the law matters so much.
So under traditional just war doctrine, you're not supposed to be able to go to war.
You should not go to war under the old school just war doctrine unless you're going to war under the command of the lawful sovereign.
for a just reason and to pursue just ends.
And so usually what this means is self-defense.
Self-defense or collective self-defense are the main reasons why one goes to war.
But what's very key in that is that first element, the order of a lawful sovereign.
So has that happened here in the United States?
And the answer is no, because American law requires for the declaration of war that that's a role reserved to Congress.
So we made that decision very early in the Republic
as part of the very deliberate decision to break up the power of a king, because the king used to have the power to declare war and also to wage war.
And what we did is we split those two powers.
We put part of that in the hands of Congress to declare war, and then we put the power to wage war and the president, that's the commander-in-chief power.
Showing 761–780 of 3,314 · page 39 of 166
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