In July 1995, in the shadow of the shocking mass murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, I sat around a table with colleagues from the Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). We were called upon to review a draft indictment against the notorious Bosnian Serb leaders President Radovan Karad?ic´ and General Ratko Mladic´. Those of us assembled in The Hague on that day were considering for the first time ever whether to charge an accused with the crime of genocide. It had just been a few months since the tribunal had become operational, there was a sense of urgency as the war in Bosnia was still raging, and there was little jurisprudence or academic commentary to guide our deliberations. After all, the Genocide Convention had been adopted only in 1948, after the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, and there had been no international criminal jurisdiction to prosecute such crimes until the ICTY’s establishment in 1993. As Legal Advisor, I had prepared an exhaustive Memorandum on the Law of Genocide that analyzed every conceivable source of authority – from the travaux préparatoires to UN expert studies – and I was confident I had mastery of the subject. But on that day, as we attempted to reduce the enormity of the horrors unfolding in Bosnia to the strictures of legal reasoning, I felt a profound sense of futility.