It is almost the definition of a State that it has control over territory, control which has to be exercised through the application, or the threat of application, of physical force. The United Kingdom is no different from other States where, over time, the institutionalisation of this physical force has taken the form of an everyday service – the police – and a service which can be called in aid at times when unusual dangers have to be confronted – the armed forces. As the principle of the rule of law has evolved, so has the way in which the police and army have come to be regulated. Rather than being the enforcers of the law they are now viewed as its servants.

This chapter explores the British sack of stormed towns from the perspective of Wellington’s command. Throughout his career, Wellington was not always consistent in how he dealt with sacks. He learnt lessons in India, but seemingly those lessons had to be learnt again in Spain. From Wellington’s perspective, the challenge was to manage and contain sack rather than prevent it entirely, something that he considered nigh on impossible. Given the centuries long tradition of plundering stormed towns, the chaotic circumstances of storming operations, and the prevailing articles of war, Wellington had only a very limited capacity to control the behaviour of his troops once beyond the breaches. Still, during the Peninsular War, as had been the case in India, a clear trend emerges: Wellington made progressively greater efforts to prevent or minimise sack plunder, with the growing encroachment of the military justice system into the space of sack itself. Moreover, Wellington cared about the welfare of civilians within besieged and stormed towns: it was not the breakdown of troop discipline alone that concerned him about sack – there was a humanity at play, too, as guarded and infrequently expressed as it was, in this most demonstrably unsentimental of soldiers.

Hans Kelsen’s interventions in the law of the Nuremberg trials have remained unexplored with the exception of notes in passim or a couple of brief studies. International criminal law, is true, was not Kelsen’s main object of study. However, the events culminating in Nuremberg, both the shocking Nazi policies and that Kelsen was an émigré in the United States were instrumental to precipitate his close engagement with international criminal law during the dawn years between 1942 and 1945. This chapter introduces the man and his ideas, traces elements of the pure theory that relate to the principle of individual criminal responsibility and, with the help of hitherto unknown archival material, describes for the first time Kelsen’s personal participation in the preparations of Nuremberg and the history behind his absence from the International Military Tribunal. The chapter concludes with a selection of two aspects of Kelsen’s activities as a legal advisor for the US War Crimes Commission: first, his insistence on the need for an international treaty as the legal basis of the IMT in order to avoid victors’ justice and problems of jurisdiction; second, his contribution towards the inclusion of individual criminal responsibility in the London Agreement.