Courtroom 600: The (Virtual) Reality of Being There

Abstract

Although at least some of the concern with prosecuting aged defendants seems to lie with defendants not quite looking the part, reviews of historic Court buildings come out the other end with allusions to eminence, authenticity, tradition, history and gravitas. Exemplary is the Courtroom 600 Project, a vr experience of the Nuremberg Trials set in a virtual rendition of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. Courtroom 600 remains today one of the major material referents in the histories of international law, representing the symbolic birthplace of International Criminal Law. The attraction of the Court moreover is such that the building has come to offer, as we would say, a legal sightseeing point of interest. In this piece, we pick up on the Courtroom 600 Project as capitalising on the interest with visiting the place ‘where it happened’, and pushing the boundaries of experiencing ‘being there’, where it happened.