A decent seminar. Professor Fazal is one of the more personable Political Science professors here at Columbia. She was pretty good at stimulating discussion in those sessions when we'd gotten around to doing the reading.
As a political science PhD seminar, this class is not a survey in what laws of war are on the books. It looks at questions like "how is the law of war created" and "does international law influence state behavior (or do they just ignore it)?" In so doing, it does what political science is so wont to do: Take a subject as exciting and dynamic as war and turn it into the most boring sh*t ever.
Actually, Prof Fazal's reading list was the most varied I've taken in a poli sci course. Of course, she makes clear that the reason is because so little work on the Law of War has been published in political science journals. We are forced, kicking and screaming, to instead learn from prose that has not passed muster with the esteemed peer reviewers of International Organization: The horror.
But yeah, there's a decent mix of books you might actually want to find yourself reading for fun, like Helen Kinsella's feminist critique in The Image Before the Weapon, and savagely painful political science articles that test null hypotheses about stuff you once thought you cared about.
After taking this course, I have a better understanding of how and when International Law influences state behavior. I also know a lot more about the origins of what we now take for granted as the Law of War (and the Geneva Conventions).