History of Law: Great Trials

Through discussion of a variety of trials spanning more than two millennia, this course will probe the nature of demonstrative and transitional justice, the relationship between ideology and law in different societies and time periods, and how trials affirm or contest legal personhood, criminal responsibility, and social marginalization. Cases to be covered include: Socrates, Jesus Christ, the French Revolutionary Terror, the Amistad case, the Dreyfus Affair, the fictional Japanese Rashomon trial, the Stalinist show trials, the Nuremberg trials, and the trials of Nelson Mandela, O.J. Simpson, Dilma Rousseff, and Saddam Hussein (to name a few).