The Birth of the New Justice

Mark Lewis is the co-author of Himmler's Jewish Tailor: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Jacob Frank, the oral history of a Polish Jew who was the head of a clothing factory at the SS-run labor camp on Lipowa Street in Lublin, Poland. Lewis received a Ph.D. in European history from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is an associate professor of European history at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

• Introduction 1: Nineteenth Century Precursors of an International Criminal Legal System 2: The Birth of the New Justice at the Paris Peace Conference 3: Crimes against Humanity and Crimes of Denationalization: The Victory of Political Expediency Over Justice 4: Blueprints for International Criminal Courts and Their Political Rejection in the 1920s 5: International Terrorism in the 1920s and 1930s: The Response of European States through the League of Nations and the Attempt to Create an International Criminal Court 6: The Search for a Victim-Centered New Justice, 1942-1946: The World Jewish Congress and the Institute of Jewish Affairs 7: The Genocide Convention: The Gutting of Preventative Measures, 1946-1948 8: Revising the Geneva Conventions, 1946-1949: Synthesizing the Old and New Justice Epilogue Conclusion

These chapters are small monographs, most of which are extremely well researched on the basis of archival sources and bring many new insights. Yet their sum does not create a history of international criminal law, but a detailed critical commentary on many of these histories of international criminal law. It is the great merit of this book that it carefully traces the discontinuities, the fissures and inner contradictions, and not least of all the political contingencies, which characterize the development of international criminal law. And nevertheless, as Lewis makes clear, the particular fragments remain in memory, surfacing again as reference points and not disappearing from history. In this sense, it is an immensely stimulating work worth reading.