Lawrence Douglas — The Criminal State
Legal scholar Lawrence Douglas and law professor Stephen Vladeck discuss how international justice mechanisms handle state-sponsored atrocities and war crimes.
Why we picked this
Douglas is one of the most rigorous thinkers on international criminal law — this conversation arrives at a moment when questions about accountability for state violence are more pressing than they've been in decades.
Lawrence Douglas, author of The Right Wrong Man and a leading scholar of war crimes trials, joins Stephen I. Vladeck for a conversation about his new book The Criminal State. The event examines how the international legal framework for prosecuting state-sponsored atrocities was built, where it breaks down, and whether existing institutions can hold powerful nations accountable.
Douglas is a professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College whose work sits at the intersection of legal theory and historical memory. Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown and a prominent commentator on national security law, brings a practitioner’s perspective on what these institutions can and cannot do in the current geopolitical moment.
The conversation is timely: with ongoing conflicts producing documented war crimes and international courts facing unprecedented political pressure, Douglas’s analysis of how and why states escape accountability speaks directly to what’s happening in the news. This is an evening for anyone who wants to understand the architecture of international justice — and its limits.