AMHERST, Mass., Aug. 23, 2005 (AScribe Newswire) -- Lawrence Douglas, associate professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College, insists that the legal response to crimes as extraordinary as those of the Nazis, Milosevic and now Saddam Hussein must take the form of a show trial. "War crimes trials are necessarily 'pedagogic trials'," Douglas says. "The purpose of these proceedings is both to demonstrate the truth of the charges brought against the accused and to teach history lessons to a larger domestic and international audience. This held true for the Nuremberg, Eichmann and Barbie trials; we see this motive presently at work in the Milosevic trial; and it will also play a crucial role in the Hussein trial."

Such a trial, Douglas argues, can serve both the interest of justice, conventionally conceived, and a broader didactic purpose. "At the heart of these [Holocaust] trials," he wrote in "The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust" (2001), "lay competing conceptions of the law itself. On one hand, the trials sought to introduce sober, rule-bound authority into a terrain of lawlessness by bringing perpetrators of atrocity to justice. On the other hand, the trials sought to serve the interests of history and memory."

The concern of some legal commentators that such a proceeding is nothing more than a show trial, a legal sham, is important, Douglas agrees, but "it is naïve-and potentially disastrous-to believe that the pedagogic dimension of the trial can be eliminated. The question is not whether the trial should be used for these larger ends, but how to do so responsibly."

"A successful pedagogic trial will strike a balance between spectacle and sobriety," Douglas says. "Many journalists criticized the Nuremberg trial as being shockingly dull: it disappointed those who expected and demanded good judicial theater. The Milosevic trial has likewise lost its international audience as a result of its snail-like pace. The Demjanjuk ('Ivan the Terrible') trial, by contrast, swung too far in the direction of spectacle, as the court gave survivor witnesses free rein to tell their moving-but from a legal standpoint, irrelevant- stories. A successful war crimes trial-the Eichmann trial remains an outstanding example of such a success-must strike a balance between spectacle and sobriety."

"A pedagogic trial is a high-risk legal proceeding. Even if the prosecution succeeds in the conventional legal sense of winning a conviction, it can fail as a pedagogic exercise. This will most often happen when the defense puts history on trial. When the defendant is less interested in acquittal than in martyrdom and hijacks history toward this end, the trial can turn into a pedagogic disaster-even if the defendant is ultimately convicted. The on-going Milosevic trial remains an outstanding example of this problem. It could come to haunt the Hussein trial as well."

Finally, Douglas notes, "The success of a pedagogic trial can only be accessed over broad time and space. Such trials play before multiple audiences: victims clamoring for justice, sympathizers for the accused, a legal community on the ground and abroad, and a larger international lay community. These communities will measure success differently just as their perceptions will shift over time. At the time of its staging, Nuremberg aroused indifference in the vast majority of Germans. In the '50s, Germans viewed the trial with contempt, as an exercise in 'victor's justice.' Today, most Germans view the trial with great respect and it is German jurists who have most aggressively supported the fledgling International Criminal Court, the body boycotted by the Bush administration."

Douglas's 2001 book considered the leading trials of the perpetrators and deniers of the Holocaust -- the first Nuremberg trial, the trials of Adolf Eichmann and Ivan Demjanjuk in Israel, the French trial of Klaus Barbie and the Canadian trials of Holocaust negationist Ernst Zundel. He demonstrated that some trials, such as Nuremberg and Eichmann's, succeeded in serving both justice and history, while others, such as the Zundel and Demjanuk trials, failed. As prosecutors now prepare the case against Saddam Hussein, Douglas defends such trials of "traumatic history" as "dramatic and necessary acts of legal and social will."

A professor at Amherst since 1990, Douglas received an A.B. degree from Brown University, an M.A. from Columbia and a J.D. from Yale Law School. His essays and commentary have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, The TLS and The New Republic.

NOTE: Douglas is available for interviews. Call Paul Statt, Amherst Media Relations, 413-542-8417.