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Political Trials in Theory and History
About this book
From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not all political trials are show trials or contrive to set up scapegoats. This volume offers a novel account of political trials that is empirically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated, linking state-of-the-art research on telling cases to a broad argument about political trials as a socio-legal phenomenon. All the contributors analyse the logic of the political in the courtroom. From archival research to participant observation, and from linguistic anthropology to game theory, the volume offers a genuinely interdisciplinary set of approaches that substantially advance existing knowledge about what political trials are, how they work, and why they matter.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- 1 “The Justice of My Cause Is Clear, but There’s Politics to Fear”: Political Trials in Theory and History
- 2 The Trial of Socrates as a Political Trial: Explaining 399 BCE
- 3 The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus: A Formal Model
- 4 Jan Hus in the Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts
- 5 The French Revolutionary Trials
- 6 The Soviet Union, the Nuremberg Trials, and the Politics of the Postwar Moment
- 7 Brown v. Board of Education: Private Civil Litigation as a Political Trial
- 8 The Eichmann Trial in Law and Memory
- 9 In the Theater of the Rule of Law: Performing the Rivonia Trial in South Africa, 1963–1964
- 10 China’s Gang of Four Trial: The Law v. The Laws of History
- 11 Anger, Honor, and Truth: The Political Prosecution of Neapolitan Organized Crime
- 12 “This Following Orders Thing Is Very Relative”: Ascriptions and Assumptions of Responsibility in the Causa ESMA, 1983–1987
- 13 The Microsoft Case as a Political Trial
- 14 The Trials of Khodorkovsky in Russia
- 15 Nashiri in Gitmo: The Wages of Legitimacy in Trials before the Guantanamo Military Commissions
- Index