The Nuremberg trials stand as a pivotal moment in any history of international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and international human rights.1 As Teitel writes, ‘the trials at Nuremberg represented a unique historical crossroads for the three legal orders that form the humanity law framework’.2 By introducing crimes against humanity into international law, the trials are said to have contributed to the creation of a new normative order, aimed at protecting vulnerable humanity.3 For prosecuting individuals for these and other war crimes, they are presented as an example of the rationality and calm procedure of international law overcoming violence, power and the baser instincts of revenge.4

“Genocide” became an option to codify the Martens Clause when Axis Rule was published in late 1944. But “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “crimes against peace” were the favored options among Allied authorities in the first half of the 1940s. Genocide’s breakthrough as a politically viable legal concept was dependent less on Lemkin’s well-known energetic advocacy than on its repositioning in a field of conceptual options over which he had no control. Lemkin’s achievement was not to invent a “new word … to denote an old practice in its modern development” but to contrive a conceptual artifice that enabled a new coalition of small states and civil society groups like the WJC to create a new reality by combining the “crippling” and “extermination” of nations after the disappointing outcome of the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. In doing so, he introduced definitional instability into the concept. Genocide’s redefinition in the UN Convention negotiated between 1947 and 1948 made the Holocaust the archetype of genocide.

This chapter discusses the life and times of B. V. A. Röling, with a particular view to his contribution to the new discipline of international criminal law, and through the particular prism of an ethical analysis. At the heart of the article is Röling’s lukewarm involvement with the Tokyo Tribunal, which posed an ethical dilemma for him. The chapter sketches how he worked his way through his dilemma, and in doing so hopes to shed some light on the possibilities for adding virtue ethics to the global governance vocabulary.

Professor Aron Trainin (1883–1957), an outstanding Russian and Soviet criminal law scholar, has played a leading role in academic support of the Soviet Union’s team in Nuremberg and contributed to the drafting of the IMT Charter and Judgment. His writings to a large extent shaped the Soviet approach to international criminal law. The chapter addresses Trainin’s biography and follows the major steps in his academic career from its beginning in tsarist Russia to its the peak, when Trainin held the positions of associate member of Soviet Academy of Sciences and professor at Moscow University. The chapter traces the sources of Trainin’s interest in international criminal law and addresses the scholar’s contribution to the ICL. The author focuses specifically on two areas, where the impact of Trainin’s was significant – a legal justification for crimes against peace, and the concept of complicity.