Book launch for “The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice”

We are pleased to announce our upcoming book launch for The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice with Author and Professor Lawrence Douglas. Listed as Foreign Policy’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year, The Criminal State offers a thought-provoking account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. From Leopold’s rule over the Congo, through the era of Nazi aggression, to Putin’s war in Ukraine, Douglas weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities. While showing how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny, the book also demonstrates Nuremberg’s failure to establish a lasting framework for regulating state aggression through criminal accountability.

Lunch will be provided!

Panelists

Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College. His many books include The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (Yale, 2001), The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton, 2016), and Where Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020 (Twelve/Hachette 2020).

Gerald L. Neuman (moderator) is the Director of the School’s Human Rights Program, and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at HLS. Neuman teaches courses in international human rights law, immigration and nationality law, and U.S. constitutional law. From 2011 to 2014, he served as a Member of the UN Human Rights Committee. Neuman holds a JD from HLS and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This event is organized by Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program and co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School’s Advocates for Human Rights and the Harvard Human Rights Journal.