The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust - Softcover

Douglas, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300109849 ISBN 13: 9780300109849

Publisher: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

Synopsis

This powerful book offers the first detailed examination of the law's response to the crimes of the Holocaust. In vivid prose it offers a fascinating study of five exemplary proceedings-the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals the Israeli trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk the French trial of Klaus Barbie and the Canadian trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. These trials the book argues were "show trials" in the broadest sense: they aimed to do justice both to the defendants and to the history and memory of the Holocaust. With insight Lawrence Douglas explores how prosecutors and jurors struggled to submit unprecedented crimes to legal judgment and in so doing to reconcile the interests of justice and pedagogy. Against the attacks of such critics as Hannah Arendt Douglas defends the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials as imaginative if flawed responses to extreme crimes. By contrast he shows how the Demjanjuk and Zundel trials turned into disasters of didactic legality obfuscating the very history they were intended to illuminate. In their successes and shortcomings Douglas contends these proceedings changed our understandings of both the Holocaust and the legal process-revealing the value and limits of the criminal trial as a didactic tool.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Douglas is associate professor in the department of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College.

Review

"A worthy participant in the debate begun by Hannah Arend. . . a very good book about a very important topic." -- Robert A. Burt, Yale Law School

"Douglas fuses a rigorous legal critique with razor-sharp literary and historical sensibilities. The result is a vivid and gripping account." -- James E. Young, University of Massachusetts, author of The Texture of Memory and At Memory's Edge

"This remarkable book argues powerfully that the law can not only render justice, but also educate . . . . brilliant and authoritative." -- Michael R. Marrus, University of Toronto

"With exquisite grace, technical brilliance, and philosophic insight . . . a worthy successor to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem" -- Owen Fiss, Yale University

[A] unique and well-written account of the various trials involving the genocide of European Jewry. -- Choice

Edition details

• Publisher: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300109849
• ISBN 13: 9780300109849
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 335