The fruits of wrongdoing in international law: What does (and does not) happen when laws are broken

There are three basic perspectives on consequences of norm violations in international law: the compensatory, the utilitarian, and the punitive. The principal one is compensatory, in which the purpose is to make the injured party whole. This was an important feature of medieval just-war doctrine, and it is seen at its clearest in the original medieval practice of reprisals. It remains at the core of the modern law as the principle of reparation. The utilitarian approach is oriented toward inducing the norm-violating party to alter its conduct and thereby is essentially rehabilitative in nature. Its clearest manifestation is in the 19th-century reprisal practice, which is the direct ancestor of the contemporary law of countermeasures. Least prominent of the three approaches has been the punitive one. Post-medieval just-war doctrine provided for punitive wars, although actual examples are few. Modern international law takes a principled stand against punitivity, although there are some indications that that could change in the future.