Nuremberg Law and U.S. Courts

It has been over three years since the young draft resister, David Henry Mitchell, III, launched his effort to persuade our courts to enforce the principles of international law proclaimed at Nuremberg. Unfortunately, that effort has not been a particularly successful one. Nor have the subsequent legal battles, initiated by others who believe American action in Vietnam to be in violation of international law, had much greater success. True, in the cases of Captain Howard Levy and of the Fort Hood Three, American courts did take some steps toward confronting the extremely important questions first raised by Mitchell. We now know that not every judge in the land (when faced with a case of noncooperation with the military) will brush aside a defense based on the Nuremberg Charter and judgment with the label of “irrelevant.” But we have yet to see anything like a “full-scale” Nuremberg defense presented to and weighed by either a civilian or a military court. No...