The international community has yet to develop a broadly accepted philosophical rationale for the extraterritorial adjudication of war crimes. Instead, several justifications exist in a state of tension that produces uncertainties in the applicable legal doctrines and policies. This article explains how the competition between the “atrocities” approach on the one hand, and the statist and humanitarian rationales on the other, causes instability in the regime. It advocates for increased attention to the philosophical grounding of extraterritorial war crimes trials, (...) particularly in light of the increasing frequency of such trials before international courts as well as national courts exercising universal jurisdiction. (shrink)

What do we know about war crimes and justice? What are the discursive practices through which the dominant images of war crimes, atrocity and justice are understood? In this wide ranging text, Michael J. Shapiro contrasts the justice-related imagery of the war crimes trial with literary justice: representations in literature, film, and biographical testimony, raising questions about atrocities and justice that juridical proceedings exclude. By engaging with the ambiguities exposed by the artistic and experiential genres, reading them alongside policy and (...) archival documentation and critical theoretical discourses, Shapiros War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice challenges traditional notions of responsibility in juridical settings. His comparative readings instead encourage a focus on the conditions of possibility for war crimes as they arise from the actions of states, non-state agencies and individuals involved in arms trading, peace keeping, sex trafficking, and law enforcement and adjudication. Theory springs to life as Shapiro draws on examples from legal discourse, literature, media, film, and television, to build a nuanced picture of politics and the problem of justice. It will be of great interest to students of film and media, literature, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and political science. (shrink)

What do we know about war crimes and justice? What are the discursive practices through which the dominant images of war crimes, atrocity and justice are understood? In this wide ranging text, Michael J. Shapiro contrasts the justice-related imagery of the war crimes trial with?literary justice?: representations in literature, film, and biographical testimony, raising questions about atrocities and justice that juridical proceedings exclude. By engaging with the ambiguities exposed by the artistic and experiential genres, reading them alongside policy and archival (...) documentation and critical theoretical discourses, Shapiro?s War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice challenges traditional notions of?responsibility? in juridical settings. His comparative readings instead encourage a focus on the conditions of possibility for war crimes as they arise from the actions of states, non-state agencies and individuals involved in arms trading, peace keeping, sex trafficking, and law enforcement and adjudication. Theory springs to life as Shapiro draws on examples from legal discourse, literature, media, film, and television, to build a nuanced picture of politics and the problem of justice. It will be of great interest to students of film and media, literature, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and political science. (shrink)

The article examines the emergence in the 1990s of the issue of “Comfort women” and the conditions that led to the holding of The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery. It argues that it was a response both to victims’ needs and to the prevailing revisionism concerning the violence committed during the Asian-Pacific war by the Japanese army, which had been the subject of the Tokyo war crimes trials of 1946-1948. The women’s (...) tribunal represents a significant moment in the recognition and condemnation of the specific violence perpetrated against women in wartime and during armed conflicts: it is both the result of of new paradigms in women’s history and oral history, and the starting point for active support for women victims of violence. L’article examine les conditions qui ont permis la tenue du Tribunal international des femmes de Tokyo pour juger du système de l’esclavage sexuel institué par l’armée impériale japonaise pendant la guerre d’Asie-Pacifique (1937-1945). Il considère qu’il a été à la fois une réponse aux besoins des victimes et au révisionnisme ambiant sur les questions des violences commises pendant la guerre d’Asie-Pacifique et jugées lors du procès militaire de Tokyo en 1946-1948. Moment important pour la reconnaissance et la condamnation des violences exercées à l’encontre des femmes en temps de guerre et lors des conflits armés, il est à la fois l’aboutissement de nouveaux paradigmes en histoire des femmes et histoire orale, et le point de départ pour un soutien actif aux femmes victimes de violence. (shrink)

This chapter applies insights from the expressive theory of punishment to the case of the punishment of war criminals by international tribunals. Wringe argues that although such cases are not paradigmatic cases of punishment, the denunciatory account can still cast light on them. He argues that war criminals can be seen as members of an international community for which international tribunals can act as a spokesperson. He also argues that in justifying the punishment lof war criminals we should pay especial (...) attention to the expressive function of the trial. (shrink)

This article argues in favor of holding leaders responsible for international crimes but also worries quite a bit about what would be a fair standard of mens rea for these leaders. Section 1 sets out the key facts of the case and the basis of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia Trial Chamber's conviction of General Tihomir Blaskic. Section 2 presents the basis of the ICTY Appeals Court's overruling of the Trial Chamber's decision. Section 3 focuses on the issue of (...) mens rea concerning those who command others to commit such crimes as the taking of hostages and the use of human shields. Section 4 sets out a limited argument in favor of negligence as a type of mens rea in international criminal law. Finally, section 5 discusses the relevance of the idea of the theory of joint criminal liability in such cases. (shrink)

This article discusses Lysias’ Against Eratosthenes as an ancient Athenian instance of the superior orders plea, a line of defence made notorious during the Nuremberg trials, which in turn became the cornerstone of modern war crime legislation. Whereas the pre-Nuremberg jurisdiction largely embraced the principle of superior responsibility, whereby a subordinate executing criminal orders was not to be held liable for them, the trials of the Nazi war criminals brought about a complete reversal of this doctrine. While (...) remaining faithful to the spirit of the Nuremberg jurisdiction, the subsequent legislative acts sought to further elaborate its underlying principle of absolute liability, in order to precisely determine the question of guilt and innocence. I argue that despite the close relationship between modern legal systems and Roman law, which fully embraced the doctrine of superior responsibility, it is in the juridical thought of ancient Athens that one finds the archetype of contemporary war crime legislation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 1 See Russell’s exposure of this derogatory contraction of “Viet Nam Cong San” (“Vietnamese Communists”) in his War Crimes in Vietnam (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 45n. On the importance of language, cf. the legendary remark of Russell’s correspondent, Mohammad Ali: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Russell attempted (...) to enlist Ali on behalf of the iwct (see the ra for their letters of 8 April, 18, 31 May, 11 Sept., 17 Oct., 15 Nov. and 16 Dec. 1967). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 31 (winter 2011–12): 167–87 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ibliographies, rchival nventories, ndexes A SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL: LONDON, STOCKHOLM AND ROSKILDE Stefan Andersson [email protected] i.wintroduction T he International War Crimes Tribunal (iwct) on the United States’ warfare in Vietnam was founded in 1966 through the moral outrage of the British philosopher and political activist Bertrand Russell, his private secretary Ralph Schoenman, Ken Coates, Chris Farley and other people connected to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. They wanted to inform the world about the us government’s attempts to convince the Vietnamese population (who were mainly peasants) that capitalism is a better political-economical system than communism, by killing as many “Vietcong”1 and unarmed seniors, women and children as possible with regular carpet bombing, cluster and phosphorus bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and other illegal weaponry, and oTering the survivors pleasant lodgingsinwired-inhamlets far away from their homes and the graves of their ancestors. This charm oTensive went on for more than ten years, and although three times as many bombs fell on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as were dropped during the whole Second World War, surprisingly enough the Vietnamese were not to be converted. In the 1960s this macabre spectacle could be watched on television all over the world, but very few protested against it. Until 1968 the majority of American January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 168 stefan andersson 2 See Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York, New American Library, 1968). He met up with Noam Chomsky, “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity” (p. 180). Both were arrested and spent a night in prison together. 3 See Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 348. See also Natalie Atkin, “From Margin to Mainstream: American Peace Movements, 1950s– 1970s”, in issue “Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the usa since 1945”, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, no. 32 (2004): 175–92. 4 See May 1970: Birth of the Antiwar University (New York: PathWnder P., 1971). 5 The so-called “Chicago conspiracy trials” or “Chicago 7 trials” that followed, when sevendefendants—AbbieHoTman,JerryRubin,DavidDellinger,TomHayden,Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner—were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot, showed that the us government was not going to tolerate such “unpatriotic” and “criminal ” behaviour. See James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical PaciWsm from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1996), pp. 145–51. 6 See Mark Kurlansky, 1968: the Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), and David Caute, 1968: the Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), pp. 3, 7–8, 12z–13. 7 Fredrik Logevall, “De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963–1964”, PaciWc Historical Review 61 (1992): 69–102. citizens were for the war, although some earlier, well-attended rallies against it, like the 1967 march on the Pentagon in late October,2 might have made some think diTerently. sds (Students for a Democratic Society)3 and other antiwar organizations never became the united force that could challenge the government ’s reliance on what Nixon called the “silent majority”. It was not until the us attacked Cambodia... (shrink)

Leading political theologian Oliver O'Donovan here takes a fresh look at some traditional moral arguments about war. Modern Christians differ widely on this issue. A few hold that absolute pacifism is the only viable Christian position, others subscribe in various ways to concepts of 'just war' developed out of a Western tradition that arose from the legacies of Augustine and Aquinas, while others still adopt more pragmatically realist postures. Professor O'Donovan re-examines questions of contemporary urgency including the use of biological (...) and nuclear weapons, military intervention, economic sanctions, war crimes trials and the roles of the Geneva Convention, international conventions and the UN. His enquiry opens with a challenging dedication to the new Archbishop of Canterbury and proceeds to shed new light on vital topics with which the Archbishop and others will be very directly engaged. It should be read by anyone concerned with the ethics of warfare. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary essays on the ethical issues which encompassed the trials and Code of Nuremberg have been collated from researchers from various countries in fields as diverse as medicine, bioethics, psychoanalysis, history, philosophy, Jewish thought, law, and ethics. The book focuses on five main areas: the juridical originality of the Nuremberg trials; the scientific, epistemological, and psychoanalytic backgrounds of racism and anti-Semitism; the biomedical and bioethical issues of the Nuremberg Code; a post-Nuremberg historical, ethical, and philosophical study of the (...) notion of a 'crime against humanity'; and the Jewish perspective on purity, impurity, race, and the universal ethical expectations of mankind. The goal of the interdisciplinary study is to outline the necessary components of a bridge between science ethics, and ethics and law. (shrink)

In this volume, the third in his trilogy on the philosophical and legal aspects of war and conflict, Larry May locates a normative grounding for the crime of aggression - the only one of the three crimes charged at Nuremberg that is not currently being prosecuted - that is similar to that for crimes against humanity and war crimes. He considers cases from the Nuremberg trials, philosophical debates in the Just War tradition, and more recent debates about the (...) International Criminal Court, as well as the hard cases of humanitarian intervention and terrorist aggression. His thesis refutes the traditional understanding of aggression. At Nuremberg, crimes against humanity charges were only pursued if the defendant also engaged in the crime of aggression. May argues for a reversal of this position, contending that aggression charges should be pursued only if the defendant's acts involve serious human rights violations. (shrink)

This article addresses, from a Frankfurt School perspective on law identified with Franz Neumann and more recently Habermas, the attack upon the principles of war criminality formulated at the Nuremberg trials by the increasingly influential legal and political theory of Carl Schmitt. It also considers the contradictions within certain of the defence arguments that Schmitt himself resorted to when interrogated as a possible war crimes defendant at Nuremberg. The overall argument is that a distinctly internal, or “immanent”, form of (...) critique is required of Schmitt's position, in which its is found wanting even on its own terms. In principle, the application of this dialectical mode of critique can allow a genuine debate to emerge between those seeking to continue both the Schmittian and critical theory traditions, whilst safeguarding the latter from the dangers of formulating polemical interventions that are, in effect, counterproductive to their own intentions. (shrink)

The institution of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg in 1945 was an event which marked the birth of cosmopolitan law as a social reality. Cosmopolitan law has existed as an abstract idea at least since the writings of Kant in the late eighteenth century, but Nuremberg turned the notion of humanity from a merely regulative idea into a substantial entity. Crimes against humanity differ significantly from the traditional categories of international law: war crimes and crimes against peace. While the latter (...) generally treats states as subjects of right and upholds the principle of national sovereignty, the former treats individuals as subjects of right and encroaches on national sovereignty. I focus here on the writings of Hannah Arendt on the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial and the actuality of crimes against humanity perpetrated in totalitarian regimes. I explore her relation to the optimistic and naive cosmopolitanism of Karl Jaspers, as well as to the two prevailing forms of critical thought: the cynical realism towards the law adopted by many of the defendants, including Carl Schmitt, and the deconstructive attitude to humanism and technology adopted by Martin Heidegger. I maintain that Arendt's rugged cosmopolitanism, tested against its critics, remains exceptionally revealing on the issue of crimes against humanity now that this issue has re-emerged, after many years of silence, as arguably the most important question of our own day. (shrink)

This article engages with the vogue for predicting the effects of the Human Rights Act 1998 by focusing on the rape prosecution and trial. The specific interest is feminist scrutiny of the right to a fair trial, particularly the concept of ‘fairness’, in light of the increasing use of disclosure rules (in Canada and England) to gain access to medical and counseling records. Transcending the two contemporary narratives of ‘victims’/women’s rights and defendants’ rights in the criminal justice system, the authors (...) argue for the infusion of the legal debate on disclosure with feminist understandings of wider cultural debates. They suggest that an increased reflexivity about intimacy, publicity and power, leading perhaps to the development of a concept of ‘democratic publicity’ (Fraser, 1997, p. 100), might help to revision the meaning of ‘relevant’ evidence in the rape trial. They also suggest that the wide-ranging cultural debate about memory, truth and history, and the emerging commitment to experimentation in responding to massive, institutionalised human rights violations (including apartheid, war crimes and child abuse) might be of use in deepening current thinking about the rape trial and listening to the ‘voice’ of the complainant. (shrink)

Justice at Nuremberg traces the history of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial held in 1946-47, as seen through the eyes of the Austrian bliogemigrbliogé psychiatrist Leo Alexander. His investigations helped the United States to prosecute twenty German doctors and three administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The legacy of Nuremberg was profound. In the Nuremberg code--a landmark in the history of modern medical ethics--the judges laid down, for the first time, international guidelines for permissible experiments on humans. One of (...) those who helped to formulate the code was Alexander. Justice at Nuremberg provides a detailed insight into the origins of human rights in medical science and into the changing role of international law, ethics and politics. (shrink)

In 1945–46, representatives of the U.S. government made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that could be viewed as war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the United States, influenced by the Canadian physician John Thompson, played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds. In Japan, the United States played an equally key role in concealing information about (...) the biological warfare experiments and in securing immunity from prosecution for the perpetrators. The greater force of appeals to national security and wartime exigency help to explain these different outcomes. (shrink)

The War Against Terrorism has put into issue two tenets of the American constitutional tradition. The first denies the government the power to imprison anyone unless that person is charged with a crime and swiftly brought to trial. The other requires the government to abide by the Constitution’s restrictions on its power no matter where or against whom it acts. This article, based on the 2005 H.L.A. Hart lecture, examines the Supreme Court’s first encounter with the Administration’s conduct of (...) the War Against Terrorism and explains how the Supreme Court’s rulings badly compromised these foundational principles. (shrink)

In late 1949 the former Soviet Union conducted an open trial of eight Japanese physicians and researchers and four other military servicemen in Khabarovsk, a city in eastern Siberia. Despite its strong ideological tone and many obvious shortcomings such as the lack of international participation, the trial established beyond reasonable doubt that the Japanese army had prepared and deployed bacteriological weapons and that Japanese researchers had conducted cruel experiments on living human beings. However, the trial, together with the evidence presented (...) to the court and its major findings — which have proved remarkably accurate — was dismissed as communist propaganda and totally ignored in the West until the 1980s. This paper reviews the 1949 Khabarovsk trial, examines the West's dismissal of the proceedings as mere propaganda and draws some moral lessons for bioethics today. As an important historical case, set in the unique socio-political context of the Cold War, the West's dismissal of the trial powerfully illustrates some perennial ethical issues such as the ambivalence of evidence and the power of ideology in making (or failing to make) cross-national and cross-cultural factual and moral judgments. (shrink)

The eminent philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt once attended a similar trial with a similar plea: the 1961 trial of the mid‐level Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. She portrayed him as an exemplar of what she termed the banality of evil. After his capture in 1960, Eichmann was tried on charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eichmann was an exemplary case of the thoughtlessness and lack of self‐reflection that goes into setting unthinkable atrocities into motion. Like Eichmann, Mao (...) doesn't cut the figure of a hardline fanatic, blinded by ideology. Mao's unwillingness to place the cause ahead of his own desires should indicate that he isn't wholly blinded by fanaticism, as Dresden is. In her characterizations of Eichmann, Arendt noted his odd lack of imagination, his inability, in other words, “to think from the standpoint of someone else.”. (shrink)

While acknowledging Hannah Arendt's keen philosophical and political insights, Kathryn T. Gines claims that there are some problematic assertions and oversights regarding Arendt’s treatment of the "Negro question." Gines focuses on Arendt's reaction to the desegregation of Little Rock schools, to laws making mixed marriages illegal, and to the growing civil rights movement in the south. Reading them alongside Arendt's writings on revolution, the human condition, violence, and responses to the Eichmann war crimes trial, Gines provides a systematic analysis of (...) anti-black racism in Arendt’s work. (shrink)

Arendt’s reflections on the reverberations of the bureaucratic way of governing give rise to two distinct and, above all, complementary argumentative trajectories: 1) its investigation as a form of domination originating from imperialism and later used as a model of totalitarian; 2) the role of bureaucrats. Both help to understand why the bureaucracy not only survived the fall of totalitarian regimes, but also remained the organizational model of nations. At the intersection of these readings, the essay “Auschwitz on Trial” presents (...) two types of participants in the Nazi bureaucratic apparatus: bureaucratic assassins (desk murderes) and subordinate men. In common among them was a lack of responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the regime and thoughtlessness; however, their degree of participation in the hierarchy and their punishability in post-war trials differed greatly. In these terms, this article aims to analyze the similarities and differences between subordinate men and bureaucratic murderers. To do so, it is assumed that understanding them helps to understand bureaucracy as a form of government that makes public freedom and the free exercise of spiritual activities unfeasible. (shrink)

Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge recounts the wartime career of Georg Konrad Morgen (1909–1982), a judge who prosecuted crimes committed by members of the SS in Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. In 1943, Morgen discovered the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He tried to throw sand in the works by prosecuting concentration camp officials for lesser crimes. He charged the chief of the Auschwitz Gestapo with for 2,000 murders, and even sought an arrest (...) warrant for Adolf Eichmann. Yet he worked within the ethos of the SS and continued to defend its reputation after the war. The book is a moral biography of Morgen, focusing on how he felt, thought, and deliberated about the moral challenges of his unique position. It explores Morgen’s moral and legal reasoning by drawing on his wartime papers as well as his postwar interrogations and testimonies at war-crimes trials. What emerges is a case study in moral complexity. (shrink)

Les femmes ont-elles été jugées pour des crimes perpétrés pendant la période nazie? Pour tenter de répondre à cette question, il convient de faire la distinction entre les procès qui se sont déroulés très vite après la capitulation allemande, dans les diverses zones d’occupation et ceux qui se font à Nuremberg, selon un nouveau droit international. Les seconds visent des criminels ayant un degré de responsabilité dans les divers appareils de l’État nazi, responsabilité alors interdite aux femmes. Les premiers, qui (...) se font selon le droit déjà établi, concernent ceux qui ont commis de leurs propres mains des violences meurtrières. On apprendra donc par cet article que de très jeunes femmes furent condamnées à mort et exécutées pour les crimes qu’elles ont commis dans les camps. (shrink)

This paper analyses the role of remorse and apology in international criminal trials by juxtaposing two prominent cases of convicted war criminals Biljana Plavšić and Esad Landžo. Plavšić was the first and only Bosnian Serb political leader to plead guilty before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Her acknowledgement of guilt and purported remorse expressed during her ICTY proceedings was celebrated as a milestone for both the ICTY and the Balkans. However, she later retracted her remorse while (...) serving her prison sentence. Landžo was a guard at the notorious Čelebići detention camp and did not acknowledge his guilt publicly during his ICTY trial. Seven years after his release from prison, Landžo personally confronted survivors and apologised to them. Through comparison of these two widely different cases, we illustrate varying roles criminal trials can play in offender’s reflection on his/her crimes and how relevance and resonance of war criminal’s remorse in and outside of the courtroom depend on how remorse is expressed and to whom. (shrink)

There has been a widespread recovery of public memory of the events of the Second World War since the end of the 1980s, with war crimes trials, restitution actions, monuments and memorials to the victims of Nazism appearing in many countries. This has inevitably involved historians being called upon to act as expert witnesses in legal actions, yet there has been little discussion of the problems that this poses for them. The French historian Henry Rousso has argued that this (...) confuses memory with history. In the aftermath of the Second World War, judicial investigations unearthed a mass of historical documentation. Historians used this, and further researches, from the 1960s onwards to develop their own ideas and interpretations. But since the early 1990s there has been a judicialization of history, in which historians and their work have been forced into the service of moral and legal forms of judgment which are alien to the historical enterprise and do violence to the subleties and nuances of the historian's search for truth. This reflects Rousso's perhaps rather simplistically scientistic view of the historian's enterprise; yet his arguments are powerful and should be taken seriously by any historian considering involvement in a law case; they also have a wider implication for the moralization of the history of the Second World War, which is now dominated by categories such as "perpetrator," "victim," and "bystander" that are legal rather than historical in origin. The article concludes by suggesting that while historians who testify in war crimes trials should confine themselves to elucidating the historical context, and not become involved in judging whether an individual was guilty or otherwise of a crime, it remains legitimate to offer expert opinion, as the author of the article has done, in a legal action that turns on the research and writing of history itself. (shrink)

There are two contrasting paradigms for dealing with terrorists: war and law enforcement. In this paper, I first discuss how the just war theory assesses the military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. I argue that the ethical problems with the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in response to 9/11 concern principles of jus ad bellum besides just cause. I show that the principles of right intention, last resort, proportionality and likelihood of success were violated. Furthermore, both (...) jus in bello principles of proportionality and discrimination were not satisfied in targeting terrorists in places where civilians not linked to them live. The law enforcement that takes place in liberal democracies is fully respectful and protective of innocent lives. Crime is dealt with by apprehending lawbreakers and putting them on trial if possible, and by keeping criminal elements on the loose away from potential victims. Good law enforcement also includes acting to remove causes of crime. I examine how this model applies to the problem of terrorism and address objections concerning the impossibility of eliminating terrorism, the slowness of success, and the possibility that there are “nut cases” who hate America no matter what. (shrink)

Law and History contains a broad range of essays by prominent legal historians, which explore the ways in which history has been used by lawyers. Largely theoretical in focus, the volume covers a broad range of issues, including discussions of norms in medieval England, the works of Montesquieu, Maine, and Weber, and of the nature of legal argument in nineteenth-century England, and in twentieth- century war crimes trials.Readership: Scholars of law and history, social historians, legal historians.

Carl Schmitt was arrested by the Russians in Berlin in April 1945, interrogated and released. In September 1945 he was arrested by the Americans and held in internment camps until March 1947, when he was brought to Nuremberg as a potential defendant in the War Crimes Trials. Although he was released in a matter of weeks without being charged, this episode has created further suspicion about Schmitt's role in the Third Reich. Without oversimplifying the complexity of the question, since (...) everything about this enigmatic jurist and political thinker defies simple or even concise explanation, the decision to interrogate him at Nuremberg was largely due to the infamous reputation he had acquired abroad. (shrink)

Law and History contains a collection of essays by prominent legal historians, which explore the ways in which history has been used by lawyers past and present to answer legal questions. In common with earlier volumes in the Current Legal Issues series, it seeks both a theoretical and methodological focus. This volume covers a broad range of topics, from a discussion of the nature of norms in the middle ages to the role of war crimes trials in the twentieth (...) century. It includes wide-ranging historiographical discussions, which examine the nature and aims of the legal historian, as well as contributions which explore the methodology and aims of writers such as Coke, Maine, Weber, Montesquieu, and Kames, who sought to use historical models to explain law. A number of contributions examine developments in legal doctrine, particularly in the nineteenth century, including developments in the law of contract, administrative law, and perjury. These raise important questions about the nature of the legal categorizations which developed in that era. Law and History also includes a collection of contributons on the use of history in twentieth century trials, including the Nuremberg trials, the trial of the Gang of Four, and trials arising from the events in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. (shrink)

This book articulates a cosmopolitan theory of the principles which ought to regulate belligerents' conduct in the aftermath of war. Throughout, it relies on the fundamental principle that all human beings, wherever they reside, have rights to the freedoms and resources which they need to lead a flourishing life, and that national and political borders are largely irrelevant to the conferral of those rights. With that principle in hand, the book provides a normative defence of restitutive and reparative justice, the (...) punishment of war criminals, the resort to transitional foreign administration as a means to govern war-torn territories, and the deployment of peacekeeping and occupation forces. It also outlines various reconciliatory and commemorative practices which might facilitate the emergence of trust amongst enemies and thereby improve prospects for peace. The book offers analytical arguments and normative conclusions, with many historical and/or contemporary examples. (shrink)

There are two contrasting paradigms for dealing with terrorists: war and law enforcement. In this paper, I first discuss how the just war theory assesses the military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. I argue that the ethical problems with the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in response to 9/11 concern principles of jus ad bellum besides just cause. I show that the principles of right intention, last resort, proportionality and likelihood of success were violated. Furthermore, both (...) jus in bello principles of proportionality and discrimination were not satisfied in targeting terrorists in places where civilians not linked to them live. The law enforcement that takes place in liberal democracies is fully respectful and protective of innocent lives. Crime is dealt with by apprehending lawbreakers and putting them on trial if possible, and by keeping criminal elements on the loose away from potential victims. Good law enforcement also includes acting to remove causes of crime. I examine how this model applies to the problem of terrorism and address objections concerning the impossibility ofeliminating terrorism, the slowness of success, and the possibility that there are “nut cases” who hate America no matter what. (shrink)

The “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and the “Geneva Declaration” by the World Medical Association, both in 1948, were preceded by the foundation of the United Nations in New York (1945), the World Medical Association in London (1946) and the World Health Organization in Geneva (1948). After the end of World War II the community of nations strove to achieve and sustain their primary goals of peace and security, as well as their basic premise, namely the health of human beings. (...) All these associations were well aware of the crimes by medicine, in particular by the accused Nazi physicians at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial (1946/47, sentence: August 1947). During the first conference of the World Medical Association (September 1947) issues of medical ethics played a major role: and a new document was drafted concerning the values of the medical profession. After the catastrophe of the War and the criminal activities of scientists, the late 1940s saw increased scrutiny paid to fundamental questions of human rights and medical ethics, which are still highly relevant for today’s medicine and morality. The article focuses on the development of medical ethics and human rights reflected in the statement of important persons, codes and institutions in the field. (shrink)

This paper explores the Eichmann trial in its dimension as a living, powerful event, whose impact is defined and measured by the fact that it is "not the same for all." I examine this legal event from two perspectives: Hannah Arendt's and my own. I pledge my reading against Arendt's, in espousing the State's vision of the trial, but in interpreting the legal meaning of this vision us one that exceeds its own deliberateness and distinct from the State's ideology. I (...) use Nietzsche's terms to contrast "critical history" with "monumental history." Whereas the official State vision of the trial is, I propose, precisely one of "monumental history, " Arendt's vision offers a substitutive "critical history." I analyze, one against the other, what I call the monumental legal vision of the Eichmann trial and the critical vision offered by Arendt. Exploring thus the monumental versus the critical as two opposed but non-exclusive and, in fact, profoundly complementary perspectives, I examine, side by side, the Eichmann trials' monumental focus on the victims and Arendt's critical objections to this focus: her objections, I show, are based in a jurisprudential conservatism coexisting with a historiographical radicalism. The Eichmann trial, in my view, is on the contrary and diametrically, historiographically conservative, but jurisprudentially revolutionary. I argue that Arendt failed to see the way in which the trial in effect did not simply repeat the victim's story, but historically created it for the first time. I submit, in other words, that the Eichmann trial legally created a radically original and new event: not a rehearsal of a given story, but a groundbreaking narrative event that is itself historically and legally unprecedented. Examining the trial's transformation of victims into prosecution witnesses, I analyze the victim-oriented focus of the trial as s legal process of translation of private traumas into public ones and as a public scene of the recovery of language and legal subjecthood by victims who were formerly defined by the oppressor's language and who were, therefore, not just injured, but essentially robbed of a language in which to articulate their injury and name their victimization. I argue that the Eichmann trial expanded the space available for moral deliberation in creating a new legal language: the trial was the victim's trial only insofar as it was now the victims who, against all odds, were precisely writing their own history. To enable such a writing, the Eichmann trial had to enact not simply memory, but memory as change. It had to dramatize upon its legal stage before the audience nothing less than a conceptual revolution in the victim. And this, in fact, is what the trial did This historically unprecedented revolution in the victim that was operated in and by the Eichmann trial is, I suggest, the trial's major contribution not only to Jews, but to history, to law, to culture - to humanity at large. I further argue that as a singular legal event, the Eichmann trial calls for a rethinking - and sets in motion a transvaluation - of the structures and the values of conventional criminal law. I submit that the quintessence of the Eichmann trial is the acquisition of semantic authority by victims. It was the newly acquired semantic and historical authority of this revolutionary story that, for the first time, created what we know today as the Holocaust: a theme of international discussion and world conversation designating the experience of the victims and referring to the crime against the Jewish people independently from the political and military story of the Second World War. (shrink)

Vier Biographien von Ärzten, die an der Tötungsaktion T4 in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus beteiligt waren. Die Biographien bilden den Hintergrund für die Untersuchung ihrer strafrechtlichen Verfolgung in den Jahren 1947 bis 1990 und für die Schilderung der Versäumnisse der deutschen Justiz im Umgang mit NS-Tätern.

Why do war crimes occur? Are perpetrators of war crimes always blameworthy? In an original and challenging thesis, this book argues that war crimes are often explained by perpetrators' beliefs, goals, and values, and in these cases perpetrators may be blameworthy even if they sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing.

War crimes are being committed in Ukraine today, but who should be held responsible? By looking at the literature on responsibility and violence by Philippa Foot and John Harris, this article argues that there are grounds for holding Vladimir Putin responsible for war crimes in Ukraine, even if he did not give the command for these crimes and other atrocities to be carried out.

Larry May argues that the best way to understand war crimes is as crimes against humanness rather than as violations of justice. He shows that in a deeply pluralistic world, we need to understand the rules of war as the collective responsibility of states that send their citizens into harm's way, as the embodiment of humanity, and as the chief way for soldiers to retain a sense of honour on the battlefield. Throughout, May demonstrates that the principle of humanness is (...) the cornerstone of international humanitarian law, and is itself the basis of the traditional principles of discrimination, necessity, and proportionality. He draws extensively on the older Just War tradition to assess recent cases from the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia as well as examples of atrocities from the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross. (shrink)

On October 25, 1946, three weeks after the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg entered its verdicts, the United States established Military Tribunal I for the trial of twenty-three Nazi physicians. The charges, delivered by Brigadier General Telford Taylor on December 9, 1946, form a seminal chapter in the history of medical ethics and, specifically, medical ethics in war. The list of noxious experiments conducted on civilians and prisons of war, and condemned by the Tribunal as war crimes and as crimes (...) against humanity, is by now more or less familiar. That list included: high-altitude experiments; freezing experiments; malaria experiments; sulfanilamide experiments; bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments; sea water experiments; jaundice and spotted fever experiments; sterilization experiments; experiments with poison and with incendiary bombs. What remains less familiar is the moral mindset of doctors and health care workers who plied their medical skill for morally questionable uses in war. In his 1981 work, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton took up that question, interviewing doctors, many of whom for forty years continued to distance themselves psychologically from their deeds. The questions about moral distancing Lifton raised have immediate urgency for us now. Military medical doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists serve in U.S. military prisons in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Kandahar, and, until very recently, in undisclosed CIA operated facilities around the world where medical ethics are again at issue. Moreover, they serve in top positions in the Pentagon, as civilian and military heads of command, who pass orders and regulations to military doctors in the field, and who are in charge of the health of enemy combatants, as well as U.S. soldiers. Because we recently marked the sixtieth anniversary of the judgment at Nuremberg, I want to awaken our collective memory to the ways in which doctors in war, even in a war very different from the one the Nazis fought, can insulate themselves from their moral and professional consciences. (shrink)

What is the relationship between war propaganda and nationalism, and what are the effects of each on support for, or participation in, violent acts? This is an important question for international criminal law and ongoing speech crime trials, where prosecutors and judges continue to assert that there is a clear causal link between war propaganda, nationalism, and mass violence. Although most legal judgments hinge on the criminal intent of propagandists, the question of whether and to what extent propaganda (...) and nationalism interact to cause support for violence or participation remains unanswered. Our goal here is to contribute to research on propaganda and nationalism by bridging international criminal law and the behavioral and brain sciences. We develop an experiment conducted with Serbian participants that examines the effects of propaganda as identified in the latest international speech crime trial as causing mass violence, and thereby test hypotheses of expert witness Anthony Oberschall’s theory of mass manipulation. Using principal components analysis and Bayesian regression, we examine the effects of propaganda exposure and prior levels of nationalism as well as other demographics on support for violence, ingroup empathy, and outgroup empathy. Results show that while exposure to war propaganda does not increase justifications of violence, specific types of war propaganda increase ingroup empathy and decrease outgroup empathy. Further, although nationalism by itself is not significant for justifying violence, the interaction of increased nationalism and exposure to violent media is significant for altering group empathies. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to international criminal law and the cognitive science of nationalism. (shrink)

The “asymmetry myth” is that war crimes are committed by one's enemies but never, or hardly ever, by one's own combatants. The myth involves not only a common failure to acknowledge our own actual war crimes but also inadequate reactions when we are forced to recognize them. It contributes to the high likelihood that wars, just or unjust in their causes, will have a high moral cost. This cost, moreover, is a matter needing consideration in the jus ante bellum circumstances (...) of preparedness for war as well as of conduct within it. As part of the symposium on Ned Dobos's book, Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, I will argue that the strength of the asymmetry myth is sustained by certain forms of romantic nationalism linked to the glamorization of military endeavor. (shrink)