**Now the subject of the Netflix documentary The Devil Next DoorThe incredible story of the most convoluted legal odyssey involving Nazi war crimes**In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that ...

In advance of the 2020 election, legal scholar Lawrence Douglas prepares readers for a less-than-peaceful transition of power.It doesn't require a strong imagination to get a sense of the mayhem Trump will unleash if he loses a closely contested election. It is no less disturbing to imagine Trump still insisting that he is the rightful leader of the nation. With millions of diehard supporters firmly believing that their revered president has been toppled by maligna...

Oliver Vice, forty-one, prominent philosopher, scholar, and art collector, is missing and presumed dead, over the side of Queen Mary 2.Troubled by his friend’s possible suicide, the unnamed narrator of Lawrence Douglas’ new novel launches an all-consuming investigation into Vice’s life history. Douglas, moving backward through time, tells a mordantly humorous story of fascination turned obsession, as his narrator peels back the layers of the Vice family’s rich and bizarre history....

A sweeping history of the struggle to hold states to account for their gravest crimesThe Criminal State offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine.At its heart is La...

The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice is an authoritative guide to the rapidly growing domain of transitional justice-the practices and processes of reckoning pursued in the aftermath of historic injustice. Since the neologism's coining in the late 1990s, “transitional justice” has become one of the 21st century's most influential practices of international humanitarianism. However, transitional justice projects often conceal the very violence they are intended to address - ...

If you take a video of police officers beating a Black man into unconsciousness, are you a witness or a bystander? If you livestream your friends dragging the body of an unconscious woman and talking about their plans to violate her, are you an accomplice? Do bodycams and video doorbells tell the truth? Are the ubiquitous technologies of visibility open to interpretation and manipulation? These are just a few of the questions explored in the rich and broadly interdisciplinary essays within...

An analysis of how problematic laws ought to be framed and consideredFrom the murder of George Floyd to the systematic dismantling of voting rights, our laws and their implementation are actively shaping the course of our nation. But however abhorrent a legal decision might be—whether Dred Scott v. Sanford or Plessy v. Ferguson—the stories we tell of the law’s failures refer to their injustice and rarely label them in the language of infamy. Yet i...

It has long been standard practice in legal studies to identify the place of law within the social order. And yet, as The Place of Law suggests, the meaning of the concept of "the place of law" is not self-evident.This book helps us see how the law defines territory and attempts to keep things in place; it shows how law can be, and is, used to create particular kinds of places -- differentiating, for example, individual property from public land. And it looks at place as a metaphor...

The essays look at the consequences that legal practice has on the lives of its practitioners as well as on the individual legal subject and on the shape of shared identities. These essays challenge liberal and communitarian notions of what it means to live the law.In the first of the essays, Pnina Lahav presents a study of the Chicago Seven Trial to paint a picture of the law's power to serve as a site for the definition of a collective group identity. In contrast, Sarah Gordon fo...

The possibility of law in the absence of a nation would seem to strip law from its source of meaning and value. At the same time, law divorced from nations would clear the ground for a cosmopolitan vision in which the prejudices or idiosyncrasies of distinctive national traditions would give way to more universalist groundings for law. These alternately dystopian and utopian viewpoints inspire this original collection of essays on law without nations.This book examines the ways in ...

Law calls communities into being and constitutes the "we" it governs. This act of defining produces an outside as well as an inside, a border whose crossing is guarded, maintaining the identity, coherence, and integrity of the space and people within. Those wishing to enter must negotiate a complex terrain of defensive mechanisms, expectations, assumptions, and legal proscriptions. Essentially, law enforces the boundary between inside and outside in both physical and epistemological ways.

Key binaries like public/private and speech/conduct are mainstays of the liberal legal system. However, the pairing of criminal/enemy has received little scholarly attention by comparison. Bringing together a group of distinguished and disciplinarily diverse scholars, Criminals and Enemies, the most recent volume in the Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, addresses this gap in the literature. Drawing on political philosophy, legal analysis, and historical res...