Professor Gerry Simpson

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time), MSc in Human Rights and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places and demand is typically high. This may mean that you’re not able to get a place on this course.

The course looks at considers the rules, concepts, principles, history, institutional architecture, and enforcement of what we call international criminal law or international criminal justice, or, sometimes, the law of war crimes. The focus of the course teaching is the area of international criminal law concerned with traditional “war crimes” and, in particular, four three of the core crimes set out in the Rome Statute (war crimes, torture as a crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression). It adopts a historical, philosophical and practical focus throughout, though the course is mainly directed at the conceptual problems associated with the prosecution of war criminals and, more broadly, legalised retribution. Attention, in this respect, will be directed towards the moral and jurisprudential dilemmas associated with bureaucratic criminality and individual culpability during international criminal law’s iconic events at Versailles in 1919, at “Tokyoberg” between 1945 and 1948, in The Hague, and in Jerusalem in 1961. Topics might include Pre-History (Vitoria, Grotius, Gentili, Cicero), Versailles, Nuremberg and Tokyo, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Crimes Against Humanity, the Crime of Aggression, Anti-Anti-Impunity, International Criminal Law’s Historical Method.

This course will have two hours of teaching content each week in Michaelmas Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Michaelmas Term.

One 2,000 word essay.

Gerry Simpson, Law, War and Crime, (2007).

Gerry Simpson “Unprecedents” in Retrials (eds. Immi Tallgren and Thomas Skouteris, Cambridge: 2020)

Gerry Simpson “Epilogue: The Next Hundred Years” in The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law. (eds. Kevin Heller, Jens Ohlin, Sarah Nouwen, Fred Megret, Darryl Robinson, Oxford: 2019.

Philippe Sands, East-West Street, (2017).

Georg Schwarzenberger, International Law and Totalitarian Lawlessness, (1943)

Judith Shklar, Legalism, (1964)

Maurice Hankey, Politics, Trials, Errors (1950)

Christine Schwobel, Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law: An Introduction (2015.

Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950 (2014).

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours, reading time: 15 minutes) in the summer exam period.