Changing Hats

Abstract

The war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg are well known as key arenas of judicial retribution after the Second World War and for institutionalizing international criminal justice. Their personnel, the ‘Nuremberg lawyers’, have been credited with advancing the cause of international law and (re)building the post-war global order. Critics, though, have chastised what they conceive of as the mistaken recourse to legal ideas and legal language as an either naïve or outright hypocritical, but in any case inadequate way of addressing the challenges of power politics in the Cold War era and beyond. Common to both sides are sweeping, often implicit notions of who the ‘Nuremberg lawyers’ actually were, what drove them, and how they interacted. By categorizing academic training and practical experience, national and biographical contexts, normative inclinations, individual ambitions, and practical functions, this chapter offers a classification of Nuremberg’s lawyers which provides a helpful taxonomic tool for international tribunals more generally.