Volume 13, Issue 1 -

At the heart of this paper lies the perennial problem of the legitimacy of tribunals judging war criminals and the role of public imagery in countering Victor’s Justice challenges. The paper follows along the paths of components of the cultural transfer from Nuremberg and Tokyo international tribunals (1946–1948) for the prosecution of war criminals post World War II through the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague (1993), focusing on two specific ‘carriers’ of this cultural transfer: “Law” and “Architecture.” By Law, I mean the copying and re-application of similar legal procedures, the active participation of certain people within two of the three instances, and even the carrying forward of physical pieces of evidence from one trial to another. By Architecture, I mean the actual construction of the trial chamber in all three places. The location of the judges’ bench, the defendants’ dock, the witnesses stand, and the inter-relational architectural flow which became characteristic of each of these Lieux de Justice . In terms of public imagery, important counter measures to Victor’s-Justice claims also included the ample facilitation of journalist coverage, the provision of full translation services for the defendants (countering claims of linguistic non-misunderstanding), and the holding of the defendants in humane conditions of incarceration, in a somewhat deliberate juxtaposing countenance to their own crimes which habitually included concentration camps and harshly inhumane incarceration facilities. The paper concludes with a recalibration of Hannah Arendt’s mistaken claim vis-à-vis Eichmann, in contrast to her important understandings concerning the banality of evil.

This paper explores the power of images vis-à-vis the practice and theory of international law, with a focus on rules of customary international law, i. e. the unwritten general rules of international law, that apply to all states (as well as to non-state actors falling within their scope of application), irrespective of specific acceptance. As Sherwin writes: “We are awash in images.” States, international organizations (IOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), insurgents, terrorists and other groups of individuals of all sort, are in the news and our movies, on our TV screens, newspapers, internet and social media. Modern technologies, visual digital technologies, in particular, have a profound impact on the means and speed of communications across the globe and immensely facilitate the task of seeking information of all sort. In international law, images are a means for spreading knowledge about the practice of states and other actors. As with law in general, images are also found to be a valuable resource in explicating the rules of international law. They aid and clarify the analysis of international law and the determination of the existence and content of rules of customary international law. In contemporary international settings, however, modern technologies of visual representation are also a means for influencing the development of international law , i. e. the existence and content of international norms. Moreover, looking at implementation , at no time in history has there been more information available to governments and the public about violations of international norms (particularly, but not exclusively human rights violations): more and more these violations are documented through images. Yet, international law doctrines have failed so far to comprehensively assess the power of images, beyond that of a toolkit for thick cultural description – the power of narrative – and analysis. The present essay offers a contribution in this direction.

This article revolves in essence around the contributions made by the architect Moshe Safdie to the Yad Vashem memorial and museum in Jerusalem. Both probably need at least a brief introduction, if for no other reason than the nature of the present publication, which has a somewhat different scope than the type of art-historical or architectural-historical journals to which reflections of this kind are usually consigned. The first part draws a profile of Safdie, who enjoys a well-established international reputation, even if he has not yet been fully acknowledged in Italy. In order to better understand who he is, we shall focus on the initial phase of his career, up to 1967, and his multiple ties to Israel. The range of projects discussed includes the Habitat 67 complex in Montreal and a significant number of works devised for various contexts within the Jewish state. The second part focuses on the memorial and museum complex in Jerusalem that is usually referred to as Yad Vashem. We will trace Yad Vashem from its conception, to its developments between the 1950s and 1970s, up until the interventions of Safdie himself. Safdie has in fact been deeply and extensively involved with Yad Vashem. It is exactly to this architect that a good share of the current appearance of this important institute is due. Through the analysis of three specific contributions – the Children’s Memorial, the Cattle Car Memorial and the Holocaust History Museum – and a consideration of the broader context, this article shows that Yad Vashem is today, also and especially thanks to Safdie, a key element in the formation of the identity of the state of Israel from 1967 up until our present time.

Brexit is very much about the boundaries of law and government. Whatever else it may be, it is clearly a legal phenomenon. In this article, I explore how both the phenomenon of Brexit (its desire to reassert national boundaries from an EU seemingly bent on dissolving them), and that of the EU (a pluralist community, with membership inevitably eroding boundaries) may be very effectively captured, and important insights gained, through the medium of images. The selected images reveal the story of Brexit to be far from illustrious, but additionally undermine some of the EU’s official messages. These images expose some of our assumptions about law, the EU and Brexit.

This paper explores the role of images in facilitating debates on the responsibility of convicted war criminals. Previous research on the mediation of war crime trials in Serbia has mainly focused on political and media discourses or everyday practices as verbal or textual modes of communication, showing the dominant nationalism and widespread denial, with convicted war criminals appearing as heroes and celebrities. This article argues that the normalization of convicts was partially realized through the avoidance of atrocity images and the prevalence of iconic images of convicts, who are described as persons “freed by the court.” The paper explores two instances when iconic images of convicts served as catalysts in debates on their criminal responsibility, pointing out that images might limit the scope of the debate, and condition the type of questions posed. Archival atrocity images, on the other hand, might provide much-needed context and evidence about crimes. Considering the powerful role of images, the article urges a more systematic analysis of images in the transitional justice field, as some of the images turn into symbolic presentations of the past for future generations.

The title should not sound too iconoclastic to jurists’ ears. At least not to expert procedural lawyers, mindful of the scholarly debate on the notion of justice and the goal of process (especially of civil process) arose in Germany and Italy, at the end of the nineteenth century. As the raising demand for jurisdictional performance posed new challenges to the judicial administration of those States, scholars were confronted with issues such as “unjust” decisions, the perpetuation of judicial mistakes in res judicata judgments, and the principle of party disposition in the choice of appealing wrong decisions. Such a profound and introspective debate, came to put into question even centuries old dogmas, such as the olden maxim “ res judicata pro veritate habetur .” Following that foundational juridical debate, the conventional “tools” the female figure of Justice is often displayed with, be they depicted in a XV century engraving or in a XX century sculpture outside a courthouse, A remarkable, though too partial attempt to collect images of Justice from law books printed between 1497 and 1788, may be found in Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (Yale: Yale University Press, 2011). The authors rather focus on a “political” detail – whether Justice is shown as blindfolded or not – which, at different times, was meant either as a critique of arbitrary justice or as a symbol of Justice’s impartiality. do appear to modern observers as nothing but misleading attributes of Justice. In this article, we propose to enquire into the origins of the conceptual trompe l’oeuil attached to the iconographic imagery of Justice; to demonstrate how the widespread representation of Justice in figurative arts is ultimately flawed by political overtones and distant from the truly essence of the jurisdictional phenomenon; and to show how a few exceptions of artworks and famous literary trials come much closer to grasping the essence of Justice through due process, and are way more instructive than its deified and standardized allegory.

The environmental crisis is one of the most pressing societal concerns today. Speculative fiction frequently questions current political, legal and cultural attitudes by portraying future scenarios in which some ecological disaster has changed the world order. Scottish children’s author Julie Bertagna has given her contribution to these speculations on the consequences of letting current trends in environmental behaviour continue unchallenged with her young-adult novel Exodus (2002), part of a trilogy continued in 2007 with Zenith and completed in 2011 with Aurora . This paper explores the pedagogical value of young-adult speculative fiction and examines Bertagna’s survival narrative as a questioning of environmental justice, in the light of contemporary theories on young-adult fiction, ecocriticism and human rights.

This article argues that law is an inherently modernist normative practice. Constructing a vision of Modernism which is at once an epistemology and an attitudinal disposition to doubt and make anew our assumptions about the world, the authors demonstrate that legal practice encounters the world through individual cases. Through these examples, the law is capable of both interacting with and comprehending that world, while also being forced to question the law’s own precepts and their application. In this manner, the law’s generalisations and abstractions become concrete, and can indeed be upended, through fleeting, impressionistic and highly case-specific examples. This exemplarity within law explains how law is able to navigate its apparently contradictory aspirations and natures which have bedevilled legal philosophy for millennia. In reality, law exists within a series of polarities, rather than contradictions, which are navigated through the law’s encounters with examples from the extra-legal world. The authors conclude that this aspect of the law’s nature also has practical consequences, requiring the law to maintain the fora in which new and novel cases are heard, and through which law’s modernist spirit can thrive.

Proceeding from the view that international criminal law remains a neglected area of study within law-and-literature scholarship, this article undertakes a critical reading of Rupert Bazambanza’s 2004 graphic novel Smile Through the Tears , set during the Rwandan genocide. It argues that Bazambanza’s text not only provides a powerful rendering of the subjective experience of the victims of genocide, but also reveals to the reader a number of the conditioning factors that catalysed the violence. Reading the novel alongside case law and academic literature, the article ventures an analysis of how, by exposing such factors, the text might also aid in furthering awareness and understanding of core issues relating to the legal framework of genocide.

This paper presents a portion of the results obtained from the research project “Law in Literature: the representation of judges in literary narratives.” The role of the magistrate in the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich , written in 1886 by Leo Tolstoy, is discussed following the methodological premises of law in literature and the theoretical notion of “models of judges” formulated by François Ost. Thus, a part of the history of tsarist law and of Tolstoy’s conflictual relationship to legal science is provided and reconstructed. Finally, this paper proposes an analytical reflection on the importance of this nineteenth-century novella for the comprehension of practical and interpretative problems within modern law.