Justice & Law Quote by Charles Evans Hughes

Make war a crime and you don’t just condemn violence; you try to drag geopolitics into a courtroom. Hughes’s line is radical in its procedural confidence: that the machinery of law, not the machinery of armies, should be the ultimate arbiter of state behavior. Coming from a judge, it isn’t a poet’s lament or a pacifist slogan. It’s an institutional threat: if war is criminal, then the people who sell it, authorize it, and manufacture its pretexts become liable in the same moral category as ordinary offenders.

The intent is twofold. First, deterrence: shift the calculation from “Can we win?” to “Will we be punished?” Second, moral clarity: reject the long-standing fiction that war is a tragic necessity floating above ethics. Hughes aims at the instigators, not the foot soldiers. That word choice matters. It recognizes how modern war is typically a top-down project, enabled by elites, propaganda, and bureaucratic momentum, with consequences outsourced to the young and the poor.

The subtext is an impatience with the sovereign immunity of nations. In the early 20th century, as mass warfare scaled up and legal internationalism gained traction (The Hague conventions, later the Kellogg-Briand Pact, eventually Nuremberg), Hughes’s framing anticipates the idea that “aggressive war” is not just policy but a prosecutable offense. It’s also a challenge to the convenient amnesia that follows every conflict: victory as absolution. Hughes insists that legality shouldn’t be written by the winners after the fact, but applied to the decision to start the fire.