Course Description
The Legal Holocaust in Hitler's Europe and its Aftermath in US Federal Court. This course examines the development of racial laws during WWII in France, Germany, and the British Channel Islands. We will use original documents and actual statutes and cases to understand how what was once legally grotesque became "law" in these places. We will then fast forward a half century, via the Nuremberg war-crimes of 1946, to the time when victims or their heirs began bringing restitution lawsuits in US federal courts, a development that continues to this day, the instructor being one of the plaintiffs' lawyers in a half dozen such cases, including a pending matter in the Seventh Circuit. Thus the course examines historical material as well as complex contemporary questions under US federal law and standards of professional ethics.