Margaret Burnham

Soldiers and Buses: All Aboard

The field of retrospective justice has spawned interesting scholarship on the complexities of redress for histories of slavery and Jim Crow, including reparation, official apologies, judicial remedies, and truth commissions. Although numerous studies of Jim Crow in the South have captured the social, economic, and political dynamics of the practice, in the realm of retrospective justice, adequate attention has not yet been given to the massive failure of criminal law enforcement agencies, state and federal, to respond to homicidal racial violence. Still underexplored are the patterns and prevalence of the violence, the specifics of federal/state collaboration, and the character of community resistance. This essay is based on a larger project that examines these questions; the project uses legal case studies to develop a comprehensive and qualitatively rich account of racial homicides in the 1930s and 1940s. and to engage affected communities in restorative justice practices. This particular study describes a range of harms, with a particular focus on homicide, experienced by soldiers and veterans in their encounters with Jim Crow transportation in the World War II era, and it argues that the incidence of violence was sufficiently acute and widespread so as to warrant current remedial measures, including official investigation and appropriate acknowledgment of government failures.

Fragmentation in International Criminal Law and the Rights of Victims

The two great post-modern projects in public law, international criminal justice and human rights, now cross paths in criminal tribunals where victims, relying on human rights principles, seek reparation for the harms they have endured and participation in the judicial proceedings. The tension between the goals of harmonizing international criminal law and designing a system appropriate for atrocity crimes is here examined through the lens of the rights of victims in international courts. The right to participate, conceived as an element of the right to a remedy in the international criminal court (ICC), the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC) and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) could destabilize and heighten the fragmentation of international criminal law, for the right is neither grounded in international criminal law, nor governed by common procedures in those three tribunals that do allow for victim participation. Keywords:ECCC; fragmentation; international criminal court (ICC); international criminal law; rights of victims; special tribunal for lebanon (STL)