ABSTRACT
The path that brought historians to courtrooms on the other side of the Atlantic was no less complicated. Significantly different in outlook, it did ride on the same postwar wave, sharing a similar motivation-to account for historical injustices based on racial prejudice. Attempts to put such a bad past on trial were met with similarly stiff resistance, influenced by the adversarial character of the common law system. American legal scholar Ben Palmer, addressing the American Bar Association in 1946, stated that “lawyers and historians face common problems: The analysis of documents and of evidence, the choice and arrangements of material to make a convincing case. The lawyer’s purpose is frankly partisan; the historian’s professedly impartial.” However, his address, which was otherwise praise to the incompatibility between history and law, also contained an almost prophetic corollary: “And yet there is a ceaseless drift as unperceived without history as the movements of the stars to the naked eye. And we cannot contribute, however humbly, to that vision without which the people perish unless we are aware of the drift and, if possible, can determine its direction. But alas, many of us (. . .) are oblivious of the distant drum.”1 The distant drum that undermined the incompatibility theory in the U.S. was the issue of racially motivated discrimination.
