Just as a newspaper must separate its reporting from its editorials, legal scholarship must distinguish between representations of what the law is and what the author might like it to be. Daniel Bethlehem’s proposed principles and his arguments in support of them are an amalgam of the two that, if actualized under international law, would reverse more than a century of humanitarian and human rights progress: they would undermine the general prohibition against the use of force in international relations as well as the right to life and the scope of a state’s obligation of due process in the deprivation of life.