Abstract

Should people make demands for justice relating to events occurring in the past, even the distant past? What does and what should happen when they do? These questions frame the problems of historical justice that became especially palpable during the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries and contributed to innovations in the design and use of tribunals, truth commissions and reparations initiatives. These responses to calls for historical justice deal with objections and difficulties in their own ways. Objections to such innovations include charges that they depart too radically from established legal forms, that they reopen old wounds, that they inevitably rely on stale and partial evidence, that their costs are excessive or divert resources from more pressing needs, and that they do little to prevent future atrocities or to heal social rifts.