A New Deal for the Nuremberg Trial: The Limits of Law in Generating Human Rights Norms

This article distills several arguments from a larger book project, framed as an international history of the idea of crimes against humanity, with the 1945–46 Nuremberg trial serving as a fulcrum. The project as a whole first traces the origins of the idea of a “crime against humanity,” before this concept was crystallized in the Nuremberg charter; followed by a large central section on the unfolding of the Nuremberg trials themselves; with a concluding section on some of the post-Nuremberg legacies of these ideas. This article draws on material from all three sections, but focuses on how we might understand the politics of the flagship Nuremberg trial itself, as opposed to its antecedents or longer-term legacies.