Reflections on the Trial of Vichy Collaborator Paul Touvier for Crimes against Humanity in France

On 20 April 1994, in Versailles France, Paul Touvier was convicted of complicity to commit crimes against humanity for his role in the killing of seven Jews during World War II. At the time of the crime Touvier was an oficer of the Milice, a special military force established to combat the Resistance and other enemies of the Vichy government. When Touvier's trial was finally held in spring 1994, it was the subject of enormous media attention in France and became the vehicle for a debate on the legitimacy and activities of the Vichy Regime, becoming popularly identified as a trial of the Vichy government. This essay, after tracing the historical and legal background of Touvier's prosecution, concludes that Touvier's conviction some 50 years after his crime, was legally and morally justified. Touvier's evasion of the law was remedied; his victims and their descendants were honored; the Nuremberg principles were resurrected and applied. The author is skeptical, however, about using his trial to reexamine the Vichy period and suggests that its attempted transformation by the media into an event that would produce an authoritative resolution of the various public discourses concerning Vichy France was and could only have been a disappointment.     

Centering Minoritized Students in Campus Interpersonal Violence Research

Journal of Family Violence - Campus interpersonal violence - defined as sexual assault, sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, and stalking - is a social problem that has received widespread...     

Legality and (dis)membership: removal of citizenship and the creation of ‘virtual immigrants’ in the 1967 Israeli occupied territories

This article seeks to show that liberal law continues to justify and legitimize displacements of minority populations, even in an age of universal human rights. As demonstrated by the Israeli court's 1988 decision legitimating the deportation of Mubarak Awad, citizenship and immigration laws provide juridical justifications for contemporary ethno-national settler projects. In the aftermath of a territorial conflict that defines or redefines the bounds of the state, native minority populations are vulnerable to being legally recast as ‘aliens’ or ‘virtual immigrants’. National conflict may thus be transformed by legal formalism into a question of immigration law, allowing the power relations that produce state sovereignty to slip into the background.