Friday, January 5, 2007

U.S. Holocaust Museum announces Silberman Seminar for US Law Faculty

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies

2007 SILBERMAN SEMINAR FOR LAW FACULTY
"The Impact and Legacy of the Holocaust on the Law"
June 4-15, 2007

Application deadline: February 16

The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum announces the 2007 Silberman Seminar for U.S. law faculty teaching or preparing to teach courses on constitutional and international law and related legal fields, who endeavor to draw lessons from or develop themes based on the Holocaust and other genocides. The objective of the 2007 Silberman Seminar is to strengthen participants' knowledge of the impact of the Holocaust on the development of domestic and international law.
The Silberman Seminar will consist of presentations that analyze Holocaust-era legal developments, and-through case-studies and comparisons with post-1945 legal developments-assess their impact on contemporary law. Topics will include the co-opting and corrupting of the German legal system during the Holocaust; the independence of the judiciary and judicial ethics; minority rights; property, reparations, and restitution issues; domestic legal actions against perpetrators, including denaturalization, deportation, and lustration; the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and subsequent national and international trials; continuity and change since 1945 in international human rights law and international criminal law, including peremptory norms and state and diplomatic immunities; transitional justice today; hate speech prohibitions; and genocide denial and the law.
Participants will be introduced to research resources that may be used in the classroom (e.g., Museum library, document archives, memoir collection, photo archives, oral testimonies, film and video archive, Holocaust survivor database). Participants will also have the opportunity to consult and interact with Museum staff and visiting scholars. Information about Museum and Center resources can be found on the Museum's website, here.

The Silberman Seminar co-leaders are Judge Thomas Buergenthal, International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands; and Dinah Shelton, Patricia Roberts Harris Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, editor of the highly acclaimed sourcebook, Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (2005).

Candidates must be faculty members at accredited U.S. law schools. For more information and details about how to apply, click here (opens pdf file).