NOTHING BUT THE LAW?

In the literature on legal responses to crimes against humanity, a consensus has emerged that courts of law produce mediocre historical accounts of the origins and causes of mass crimes. This book reviews recent international criminal trials, and it finds much evidence to support a critical view of law's ability to write history. At the same time, historical debates in international trials have provided important insights into the underlying factors of an armed conflict. By examining closely the concrete strategies pursued by prosecutors and defense lawyers, this study seeks to understand their motivations for venturing into the past in the first place and to discern the legal relevance of historical evidence.

A cursory review of recent international criminal trials would lend support to a skeptical stance toward the place of history in the courtroom, and at no point has the incompatibility of these two activities been more evident than during the four-and-a-half-year trial of Slobodan Milošević at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). With the death of Milošević in March 2006, only months before the court could pass judgment, a British Financial Times article diagnosed the Tribunal's central mistake: “the court confused the need to bring one man to account with the need to produce a clear narrative of war crimes and atrocities for the history books.”