The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals Quotes

“Of course, the idea that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes, is a fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity.”
― Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.

“There was a time, in fact, I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals. Of course, it was, under the law of all civilized peoples, a crime for one man with his bare knuckles to assault another. How did it come that multiplying this crime by a million, and adding fire arms to bare knuckles, made it a legally innocent act?”
― Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.

“But none of these men before you acted in minor parts. Each of them was entrusted with broad discretion and exercised great power. Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, “the State”, which cannot be produced for trial, cannot testify, and cannot be sentenced.”
― Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.

“I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.”
― Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against The Nazi War Criminals: Opening Statement for the United States of America.