LAW-WAR-CRIME: LEGAL STORYTELLING IN TRIALS in Fall 2025 (LW1099FB15)

The central focus of this Firstbridge course is the evolving notions of ‘war’ and ‘crime’ from the end of World War II to the present day. In the first half of the 20th century, the concept of ‘war crime’ reinvented international law in curious ways. During the Nuremberg trials, war as an event was judicialized- subject to not only to international relations, but to international law. In their aftermath, there has been a transformation in the way law engages with both ‘war’ and ‘crime’ as legal categories that shapes global discourse today. In this course, students will map the legal transformation of war by examining a certain oppositional relationships- between politics and law, local forms of justice and ‘global’ legal spectacles, collective guilt and individual responsibility, victimhood and perpetration.

Narrating war and violence through a criminal trial is a work of memory and affect as well as of legal norms. The promise of law is that it delivers both justice and a form of truth. It does so by telling compelling stories of human suffering through the binary of guilt and innocence. But this function is juxtaposed with its own limitations: law’s compatibility with history, its narrow sense of proportion and enforcement, and its aspiration for legitimacy and universality. In this course, we will learn what it entails to talk about war and violence in the language of criminal law by engaging two fundamental questions: How does law narrate war and crime? What does it highlight and what does it erase?