ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the legality principle through the cases of Adolf Hitler’s war crimes and a Georgia cremator’s mistreatment of bodies. Though more of a legal concept than a strict legal rule, the legality principle aims to uphold the fairness and uniformity of the criminal law’s application by requiring that all laws are defined and codified by the legislature before someone can be prosecuted for a crime. However, the legality principle has frustrated community perceptions of justice on various occasions. First, this chapter discusses how the Tribunal at the Nuremberg trials subverted the legality principle to ensure that Nazi officials were punished for their heinous actions, despite the fact that the crime of aggressive warmaking had never been formally codified. Second, this chapter reveals how an American court upheld the legality principle despite community outcry after a local cremator had abandoned hundreds of corpses left in his care. The chapter ends with a discussion of the various state approaches to the legality principle and the tradeoffs involved in applying or denying the legality principle.
