The Beautiful Crime and the Sad Law – The 1927 Schwarzbard Trial

In my talk I return to the earlier trial of Shalom Schwarzbard in Paris in 1927 - in which an individual from among the group of victims sought to bring about historical justice for a stateless group of victims - by a violent act of revenge - the murder of Semyon Petliura, the person who was seen as responsible for a series of pogroms against the Jews in Ukraine during the years 1918-1920. International Jewish organizations sought to turn the criminal trial that ensued into a historical trial on behalf of the victims of the pogroms. Eventually the French jury of twelve acquitted Schwarzbard - and Raphael Lemkin, and Hannah Arendt - saw in this trial the trigger for developing the new international crimes of genocide, universal jurisdiction and a concept of restorative justice - one that places the testimony of the victims at the center doing justice.

Leora Bilsky is a Full Professor at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, and the Director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Tel Aviv University. She earned her LL.B cum laude from Hebrew University and an LL.M. and a J.S.D. from Yale Law School (where she held a Fulbright award). She clerked for the Honorable Aharon Barak on Israel’s supreme court. She was a Visiting Professor at Toronto University and Amherst College, and a fellow in "Ethics and the Professions" at Harvard University. She has served as Editor in Chief of the political theory journal Theory and Criticism, and as editor of law journals Mishpatim, Iyunei Mispat and Theoretical Inquiries in Law. She is the author of Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (Michigan University Press, 2004), and The Holocaust, Corporations and the Law (forthcoming, Michigan University Press).