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.

This course interrogates the rules, concepts, principles, history, institutional architecture, and enforcement of what we call international criminal law or international criminal justice, a law embodied most obviously in three of the core crimes set out in the Rome Statute (crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression). We adopt a historical, philosophical and practical focus throughout, though the teaching is largely 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 in recent times and in Jerusalem in 1961.

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

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