(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)December 22, 2015

(MAHWAH, NJ) –On October 9, Dr. Mark Lewis, Associate Professor of History at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, spoke about “The Birth of the New Justice” under the auspices of The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Dr. Lewis examined how today’s international legal edifice of ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws intended to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide came into being.

Rather than arguing that these legal projects were attempts by state governments to project a “liberal legalism” and limit national sovereignty, Dr. Lewis showed that the actions of European jurists were variously motivated. Legal organizations, according to his analysis, were not merely interested in ensuring that the guilty were punished or that international peace was assured. They were also determined to instill particular moral values, represent the interests of certain social groups, and even pursue national agendas.

His 2014 Oxford University Press book, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950, was recently awarded the European Parliament’s Bronisław Geremek Prize. When it was still in manuscript, it won the London Wiener Library’s prestigious Fraenkel Prize. Mark Lewis was also the co-author of Himmler’s Jewish Tailor: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Jacob Frank, the oral history of a Polish Jew who was the head of a clothing factory at the SS-run labor camp on Lipowa Street in Lublin, Poland.

A graduate of Stanford University, Lewis received a Ph.D. in European history from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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