Lawfare Daily: ‘The Criminal State’ with Lawrence Douglas
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Lawrence Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College to discuss Douglas’s new book, “The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice.”
They talk about how and why international criminal justice shifted from a focus at Nuremberg on the crime of aggression to an “atrocity paradigm,” as well as the “belatedness problem” and other limitations of atrocity trials. They even get into Douglas’s thoughts on casting decisions for Robert Jackson, Herman Göring, and characters in last year’s film “Nuremberg.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How do you then deal with a situation at which the state itself becomes the agent of criminality? |
| 0:09.0 | And, you know, how do you deal with perpetrators or collaborators who behave out of what one, actually, |
| 0:16.0 | SS person described as the comfort of obedience? You know, how do you deal with crimes of obedience |
| 0:23.1 | as opposed to crimes of deviance? It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Tyler McBrion, managing |
| 0:30.6 | editor of lawfare with Lawrence Douglas, the James J. Grofeld Professor of Law, |
| 0:35.8 | jurisprudence, and Social thought at Amherst College. |
| 0:39.4 | When it comes to something like a crime against humanity or genocide, even if it's conducted within intrastately, within a confined state, you can basically be tried by any court anywhere. |
| 0:55.9 | And on one level, you can say, |
| 1:01.5 | that's a great thing. That's a real vindication of human rights. But it also gives rise to all sorts of possible politicization and possible unseemly abuse to my mind. |
| 1:08.1 | Today, we're talking about Lawrence's new book, The Criminal State, War, Atrocity, and |
| 1:13.7 | the Dream of International Justice. |
| 1:15.7 | Lawrence, you've described your new book in various ways that I've seen. |
| 1:21.7 | You've called it a revisionist account of the development of international criminal law over |
| 1:25.3 | the last century or so. |
| 1:27.1 | You've also called it a conceptual reconstruction of the field and my favorite, a tale of rupture. |
| 1:32.3 | So first I was just hoping you could give us a bit of a lay of the land, what you're up to in this book. |
| 1:39.3 | Yeah, so I do have those three different elevator pitches. In fact, I could even add another one which says, which I would say that the book is about how the field of international criminal law was both formed and deformed by its response to Nazi Germany. And I guess what I meant by the notion of the rupture or the conceptual overview was that, |
| 2:06.8 | I think if you look at most books about international criminal law, they basically treat |
| 2:11.9 | Nuremberg as the great early precedent. |
| 2:15.5 | Then you have some problems during the Cold War. Then finally, |
| 2:20.2 | you kind of find a renewed dedication with the UN tribunals in the 1990, and then finally with the |
| 2:28.3 | International Criminal Court. So it's more or less kind of like a somewhat linear story with bumps along the road. |
... |
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