Our guest today is Amherst College’s Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Douglas Lawrence. He is the author of seven books, including the nonfiction books, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust; and Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020; as well as the novels, The Catastrophist, and The Vices.

The recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and American Academy in Berlin, and the Carnegie Foundation, he has lectured throughout the United States and in more than a dozen countries, and has served as visiting professor at the University of London and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

His latest book, THE CRIMINAL STATE: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice, was just published by Princeton University Press. It’s a re-interpretation of international law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—and leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights. It’s a provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice, which is certainly relevant to the current conflicts around the world and, sadly, increasingly here at home, as well.

Articles pertinent to this interview:

Trump says US navy like ‘pirates’ while seizing a ship in Iranian blockade https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/02/trump-us-navy-pirates-iran-blockade

Hope out of chaos: how the dark era of Trump is creating a new approach to global politics https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/02/dark-era-trump-creating-new-approach-global-politics

Meet the New Leader of the Free World https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/26/opinion/zelensky-ukraine-trump-nato-leader.html?searchResultPosition=1

James Comey’s reindictment is the product of a twisted justice department https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/01/james-comey-indictment

Trump’s militarization of the DC police was just an opening salvo https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/27/january-6-trump-chicago-military