ABSTRACT
The International Military Tribunal for the trial of Major German War Criminals, the so-called Nuremberg Trial, has been treated as a synecdoche for war crimes tribunals. As the titles of articles and books on this subject show, examination and assessment of the international war crimes tribunals have been strongly coloured by the experience of the Nuremberg Tribunal: the Nuremberg legacy.1 In spite of the casual usage of the phrase, the meaning of the Nuremberg legacy is neither clear nor coherent. Telford Taylor suggests that the name Nuremberg ‘conjures up the moral and legal issues raised by applying judicial methods and decisions to challenged wartime acts’.2 David Luban puts ‘the legacy of Nuremberg’ as
the potential of [Nuremberg] principles for growth and development, for extension and precedent-setting, for adaptability to changed political circumstances, for underlying moral commitments that are not so much the logical implications of the principles as they are their deep structure.3
