Ephram (Fedya) Nestor, a Bulgarian-born immigrant to the United States, was “an unusual person,” according to his second wife Barbara. She met him in 1933 when he was selling vegetables from his car and remembers not really liking him. “He stayed too long,” he “talked too much,” and worst of all to this devoted radical, he “passionately espoused the cause of Communism [but] he didn't know too much about it.” Interviewed when she was ninety, sharp-witted Barbara Nestor still recalled how Fedya embarrassed her at a Marxist study group with his “foolish” statements and obvious lack of knowledge about Marx or communism. His family agreed he was “not much of a Communist” when he joined the local party in 1936 and could not be trusted with the simplest duties. Nonetheless, the federal government deported Fedya in 1956 for his brief Communist Party (CP) membership.

More than any other case from the postwar period, Brown v. Board of Education has captured the attention of historians and the public alike. The case itself, and the NAACP's campaign that led to it, have been the subject of books and articles beyond counting. In many history textbooks it is the only court case mentioned between the end of World War II and the early 1960s. It is one of a handful of cases that is recognized by the public at large and is surely the only Supreme Court case that has its own National Historic Site.

The contemporary international law of occupation, which regulates the conduct of occupying forces during wartime, was framed over the course of deliberations among European governments during the second half of the nineteenth century. The debates between representatives of strong and weak powers on this matter dominated the conferences in Brussels (1874) and The Hague (1899), whose goal was to formulate the laws of war through an international agreement. The outcome, enshrined in what is known as the Hague Regulations of 1899,1 represented a delicate balance that both provided protection for a civilian population brought under the control of an occupant and safeguarded the interests of the ousted government for the duration of the occupation. Occupation was conceived of as a temporary regime existing until the conclusion of a peace agreement between the enemy sides (unless the defeated party ceased to exist as a result of the war, a situation referred to as debellatio). The evolution of the law of occupation in the nineteenth century was a gradual process, shaped by changing conceptions about war and sovereignty, as well as by the balance of power emerging in Europe.

A conscientious reading of the rich historical literature on the American Legal Realist movement would provide no suggestion that any of the academic writers and other commentators in that movement ever gave the slightest attention to international law.1 It is entirely understandable that the Realists should be remembered as having been concerned exclusively with the analysis and reform of domestic jurisprudence and legal process; for there was only one exception, in this regard, and this was the Stanford law professor Joseph Walter Bingham. Bingham (1878-1973) is a figure who has been almost entirely neglected by historians of legal thought.2 And yet he was one of the earliest American legal commentators to promote an iconoclastic, reformist approach to the common law and American constitutional law. His writings in the 1910s and 1920s, as will be discussed further here, were important early-day contributions to the development of what would become the central canon of Legal Realism. His uniqueness among the Realists rests in the fact that he would go on to play a prominent part in contending for a basic reform in international law during the decades that followed.

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.

When former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, gave his farewell address in December 2006, he expressed his dismay at the Bush administration's conduct during its anti-terrorist campaign. The United States had given up its vanguard role in the promotion of human rights, he averred, and appeared to have abandoned its ideals and principles. There have been many statements similar to this one made in the period since September 2001. Even close allies, such as the British government, for example, have called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on the grounds that, as a symbol of injustice, it had tarnished the United States as a “beacon of freedom, liberty and justice.”