Film: Judgment at Nuremberg, Nov. 22
November 12, 2014
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
Judgment at Nuremberg, the 1961 film about the Nazi war crime trials, will be shown by the University of Baltimore School of Law on Saturday, Nov. 22 at 5:30 p.m. Judge Stephen J. Sfekas of the Baltimore City Circuit Court will introduce the film and will lead a discussion about justice and the responsibility of judges. The screening and discussion will take place in the Moot Court Room in the school's John and Frances Angelos Law Center, 1420 N. Charles St. The event is free and open to the public.
Legal scholar Michael Asimow wrote that Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer, "stands alone as the finest film about judges ever made."
Asimow, a long-term visiting professor at Stanford Law School and a professor emeritus at UCLA School of Law, laid out the movie's plot in a 1998 essay, "Judges Judging Judges—Judgment at Nuremberg": "In the film, four Nazi judges are placed on trial at Nuremberg before a panel of three American judges. Three of the German judges are Nazi thugs but one of them, Ernst Janning (played by Burt Lancaster), was quite different. Janning had been a famous and aristocratic legal scholar, a drafter of the Weimar constitution, and a man who detested Hitler and the Nazis. Yet he remained on the bench under the Third Reich."
The defense counsel, Rolfe (played by Maximilian Schell, who won an Oscar for his role), argues that Janning stayed on the bench to make the Nazi justice system more merciful than it would have been otherwise. Asks Asimow: "Should this be a defense against charges that in some cases Janning had acted in a brutal and lawless manner? And what of positivism—is it not the responsibility of the judge to carry out the laws of his country adopted by competent authorities, even if he disagrees with them?"
The Nuremberg war crimes trials presented many other "thorny jurisprudential issues," Asimow wrote, such as the issues of ex post facto criminal law and the court's ability to obtain jurisdiction over the defendants. "In particular," he asked, "what justification is there for an international (rather than a German) tribunal to try a case in which the offenses were committed by Germans against other Germans?"
Asimow mentions, too, that judicial independence was an issue for the American judges at Nuremberg: By the time of the 1947 trial on which the movie was based, the Cold War was under way and the chief American judge, Dan Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy), was under pressure to go lightly on the defendants.
The screening of Judgment at Nuremberg is co-sponsored by the University of Baltimore School of Law's Law Career Development Office and the Center for International and Comparative Law.
The University of Baltimore is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the College of Public Affairs, the Merrick School of Business, the UB School of Law and the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences.