Abstract
In this second part of the book, I examine the interactions between history and law that have spurred Belgian legal historian Alain Wijffels to coin the term forensic history. Wijffels concentrated the conclusions of his work History in Court on post-Holocaust trials and Holocaust denial trials (Wijffels, Alain. 2001. History in Court: Historical Expertise and Methods in a Forensic Context. Leiden: Ius Deco). These brought him to a rather negative conclusion on the involvement of historians in the courtroom. In order to reassess Wijffels’ term, I will compare the examples he discussed with examples from American litigation-driven history.
There is a higher court than courts of justice, and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.
Mahatma Gandhi
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- 1.
Wijffels, Alain. 2001. History in Court: Historical Expertise and Methods in a Forensic Context. Leiden: Ius Deco.
- 2.
Petrovic, Vladimir. 2009. Historians as Expert Witnesses in the Age of Extremes. http://www.etd.ceu.hu/2009/hphpev01.pdf. Accessed 31 Oct 2014.
- 3.
Wijffels, as n. 1, 11, 16.
- 4.
Wijffels, as n. 1, 244.
Bibliography
Petrovic, Vladimir. 2009. Historians as expert witnesses in the age of extremes. Budapest: Central European University.
Wijffels, Alain. 2001. History in court: Historical expertise and methods in a forensic context. Leiden: Ius Deco.
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Delafontaine, R. (2015). Introduction Part II. In: Historians as Expert Judicial Witnesses in Tobacco Litigation. Studies in the History of Law and Justice, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14292-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14292-0_4
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