Lawrence Douglas

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Lawrence R. Douglas (born 1959) is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.^[1]

Life[]

Douglas received his A.B. from Brown University in 1982, his A.M. from Columbia University in 1986, and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989.

Douglas is the author of both nonfiction and fiction. His most recent book is Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020.^[2] The book has received national and international attention for exposing the vulnerabilities of the U.S. electoral system, particularly if an incumbent president were to narrowly lose reelection and oppose the peaceful transfer of power.

Much of Douglas's nonfiction has focused on legal responses to state-sponsored atrocity. The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (Yale, 2001) examined the Nuremberg trials, Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, and Ernst Zündel (Holocaust denial) trials as examples of what Douglas calls "didactic legality": using criminal trials as tools of historical instruction and memory construction.

His book The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton, 2016), chronicles the lengthiest case to arise from the Holocaust and one of the most famous cases of possible mistaken identity in legal history. The Right Wrong Man was named a New York Times Editors' Choice for 2016.^[3]

His two novels have focused on the question of Jewish identity. The Catastrophist was named a best book of 2006 by Kirkus Reviews and received the 2006 Silver Prize in General Fiction at the Independent Publishers' Book Awards. The Vices was named a best book of 2011 by New York Magazine and the New Statesman, and was a finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award. He has published two books of humor, Sense and Nonsensibility, a collection of short sketches parodying the contemporary life of the mind written with his Amherst colleague, Alexander George, and The Girl with the Sturgeon Tattoo, a parody of Stieg Larsson's bestselling trilogy that he wrote under the pseudonym Lars Arffssen.

In 2013, Douglas wrote about Guantánamo detainee Abd al-Nashiri for Harper's Magazine.^[4] Douglas is also a regular reviewer of books on legal topics for the Times Literary Supplement^[5] and a regular contributor to The Guardian.^[6]

Douglas is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and the Carnegie Corporation.^[7] He has served as a visiting professor of law at the University of London and at Humboldt Universität, Berlin.

Works[]

• Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. Twelve Books. 2020. ISBN 978-1-5387-5187-9.
• The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial. Princeton University Press. 2016. ISBN 978-1-4008-7315-9.
• The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. Yale University Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0-300-10984-9.
• Lawrence Douglas; Alexander George (2007). Sense and Nonsensibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4165-8482-7.

Editor

• Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2013). Law and War. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781625343925.
• Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2014). Law and the Utopian Imagination. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804790819.
• Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2019). Criminals and Enemies. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 9781625343925.

Novels

• The Vices. Other Press. 2011. ISBN 978-1-59051-416-0.
• The Catastrophist. Other Press. 2006. ISBN 978-1-5905-1219-7.

References[]

External links[]

• Judging the Courts: Wikinews interviews Prof. Lawrence Douglas.
• Faculty site at Amherst College.
• Lawrence Douglas in "The Accountant of Auschwitz."
• Lawrence Douglas's Op-Eds in The Guardian.