Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: “Is Truth Unchanging Law?” – Jesus Christ Superstar Through the Lens of Modern International Law

[Dr Sergey Sayapin is Professor of law at KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan)]

Musicals are not judgments, of course – yet the best of them do plead their case in song. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar presents a performative trial set in an occupied province, governed by an official who, under pressure from local elites, seeks to absolve himself of responsibility through a ritualised washing of hands. Read alongside contemporary international law, Tim Rice’s libretto becomes a compact case study in occupation law, jurisdiction, judicial independence, fair trial guarantees, the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment, and the responsibility of officials. It helps that Rice knows his way around legal concepts. Before his show-business career took off, he trained and worked briefly in the law – that early grounding shows in the procedural texture of the lyrics and the plausibility of the legal dynamics they dramatise.

There is a good reason to connect musicals and law as objects of study. Musicals are structured conflicts: they compress arguments into scenes, juxtapose (legal) positions in duets, and place discretionary decisions under a spotlight – literally. Law students and scholars have long examined drama and film for insights into authority and legitimacy. Jesus Christ Superstar shows that musical theatre can play the same role. It offers, in two brisk hours, a sequence of decisions that can be tested against the contemporary legal standards we teach and apply. As a personal aside, I acted in a university production of Superstar while studying at the University of Essex in the autumn of 1999, which perhaps explains why the show’s legal texture has always felt unusually vivid to me.

“We Are Occupied – Have You Forgotten How Put Down We Are?”

The libretto opens by situating the story in an occupied public sphere: “We are occupied”, Judas says, before warning that any popular acclamation of kingship will trigger a Roman response. The priests, too, fear that crowning will lead to a ban and a riot. These fragments capture the predicate of occupation: effective foreign control combined with pervasive security concerns. Contemporary law codifies this scenario in Article 43 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, which charges an Occupying Power to restore and ensure public order and civil life while respecting existing laws “unless absolutely prevented”, and in the Fourth Geneva Convention’s protections for civilians. In other words, public order is a duty, but it is disciplined by legality and the continuity of local law. The Sanhedrin’s instinct in the musical – “Quick, Caiaphas, go call the Roman guard” – perfectly illustrates the relevance of occupation law.

Modern practice layers international human rights law onto this IHL framework, especially for the activities of courts and police during occupation. Where hostilities are not active, human rights law is the natural grammar for assessing the administration of justice. That duality explains why the sequences of Jesus’ trials in Superstar feel uncannily contemporary: they raise precisely the human rights questions that today would constrain an occupying administration’s judiciary and security apparatus.

“He’s Done No Wrong, No, Not the Slightest Thing!”

Those trial sequences, framed musically as a series of hand-offs and crescendos, invite assessment against the fair-trial standards in Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The Covenant, as read with the Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 32, requires equality before courts, a hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal, the presumption of innocence, adequate time and facilities for the defence, and protection from undue pressure. In the libretto, Pilate concedes, more than once, that the accused “has done no wrong”, yet allows the process to move forward under crowd pressure. The mob’s recurring chant – “Crucify him” – is not just theatrical antagonism: it is the portrait of a tribunal operating under the threat of public-order consequences and political sanction. The ICCPR’s fair trial guarantees are designed precisely to prevent adjudication from becoming a plebiscite on a defendant’s fate.

A further lyric points to the principle of legality. The priests effectively concede that they “have no law” to impose the death penalty and therefore “turn to Rome” for sentencing. In contemporary terms, the move reads as an attempt to obtain a penalty unavailable in the primary forum – an evasion of the nulla poena sine lege baseline. The choice of forum cannot be used as a device to circumvent rights an accused would otherwise enjoy, whether those rights arise in domestic law or under international human rights obligations. Legality is not just about having a rule somewhere – it is about the lawful application of the rule by a competent tribunal in a manner consistent with due process.

“But to Keep You Vultures Happy, I Shall Flog Him!”

The prohibition of torture and ill-treatment provides the sharpest legal condemnation in the score. At one critical moment, the governor announces that, to appease the crowd, he will order a flogging (“Thirty-nine lashes”) even while acknowledging the absence of wrongdoing. Under contemporary law, Article 7 of the ICCPR and the Convention against Torture prohibit torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment without exception. The Convention defines torture as the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering by, or with the consent or acquiescence of, a public official for purposes such as intimidation or coercion. Appeasing a volatile public is not a defence. Even if a decision-maker were to argue that flogging fell short of torture, the absolute ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment would still capture it. The point for modern lawyers is simple: cosmetic or political rationales cannot convert unlawful pain into lawful punishment.

“We Have No King but Caesar!”

The musical also dramatises corrosive pressures on judicial independence. The crowd invokes imperial allegiance (“We have no king but Caesar!”) and threatens Pilate with demotion or deportation if he fails to keep the peace. Under the UN Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary, judges must decide matters before them without improper influences, inducements, pressures, threats or interferences, direct or indirect. The Principles underscore not only actual independence but also its appearance. In a setting where executive forbearance is contingent on crowd control and metropolitan favour, even a conscientious adjudicator will appear compromised. That is precisely why guarantees of tenure, conditions of service, and freedom from interference matter: they reduce the space in which threats to “remember Caesar” can operate.

“You’re Herod’s Race, You’re Herod’s Case!”

Another cluster of scenes is, in effect, a lesson in jurisdiction and venue. The crowd pushes the case to the Roman governor – he probes origin and authority, then declares that, because the accused comes from a different region, “you’re Herod’s case”, and transfers him accordingly. A hearing follows before that authority, who then returns the detainee to the governor. Stripped of its theatricality, this is a series of inter-authority transfers animated as much by political convenience as by jurisdictional principle. In contemporary terms, territorial competence is presumptive for offences committed in a state’s territory, whereas personal and subject-matter jurisdiction offer further bases where appropriate. In occupied territory, the occupying administration typically asserts criminal jurisdiction but is constrained by IHL and human rights standards. Crucially, the practical legality of transfers is not neutral. Modern doctrine rejects the use of venue changes to evade rights: it is unlawful for Authority A to send a detainee to Authority B if A knows there is a real risk of an unfair trial or unlawful punishment. The rule of non-refoulement is the starkest expression of this idea but the basic responsibility not to use transfer as a tool of evasion runs more broadly through contemporary human rights jurisprudence. The “ping-pong” in Superstar reads, to a modern lawyer, less like a neutral allocation of competence and more like blame-shifting by venue.

“I Wash my Hands of Your Demolition!”

Finally, the libretto’s probably most famous legal gesture – “I wash my hands!” – reads today as a parable of command responsibility. Under contemporary international criminal law, responsibility extends beyond those who personally commit crimes to those in positions of authority who knew, or should have known, that subordinates were committing or about to commit such acts, and failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures to prevent or repress them. Article 28 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court codifies this principle. The ritual hand-washing, in this light, is a hollow gesture. Legal responsibility attaches not to outward absolution but to the inward elements of power and knowledge. A superior cannot purify himself by symbolic dissociation when his own omission sustains the machinery of abuse. Authority carries with it the duty to act: silence and inaction, when intervention is possible, make the hands no cleaner, but redder.

“We Need Him Crucified – It’s All You Have to Do!”

Superstar is scrupulous about decision points. The priests recalibrate when they perceive a risk of riot. Pilate recalibrates when he hears threats about Caesar. Herod, a jurisdictional by-way, performs a charade of adjudication that is really a test of deference. As discussed above, each of these choices has a modern legal analogue. In occupation law, authorities may take security measures, but they must do so within a framework that preserves the continuity of law and the protection of civilians. In fair trial doctrine, authorities may maintain order, but not at the expense of presumption of innocence or the independence of the bench. In the anti-torture regime, authorities may never justify pain by pointing to public order: the bans in Article 7 of the ICCPR and the Convention against Torture are absolute. In judicial independence principles, authorities must ensure both actual and perceived freedom from political inducement. In jurisdiction and venue, authorities must not use transfer to avoid legal constraints. Finally, in responsibility doctrine, authorities cannot cleanse their hands of acts they enable or endorse.

Calling attention to those decision points matters because it dissolves the temptation to treat the outcome of Jesus’ trials before the Sanhedrin and later, before Pilate as inevitable. The musical shows that it is not. At several moments, different choices would have been available and legally required. A governor could have declined to proceed where there was no evidence of wrongdoing and manifest political coercion. Authorities could have refused to transfer a detainee into the hands of an adjudicator who was plainly a political showman rather than a tribunal. Policing measures could have been taken consistently with obligations to respect existing law rather than relying on spectacle and pain. The point of watching (and reading) Superstar against modern law is not to anachronistically condemn historical actors by present standards, but to use a familiar narrative to teach the normative structure that now governs analogous choices.

That pedagogical utility is enhanced by Rice’s able writing, which is unusually attentive to legal process for a rock opera: references to “papers” and “arrest” conjure procedural formalities, the insistence that “we have no law” spotlights legality, the repeated returns to “Caesar” and to the risk of demotion dramatise the politics of adjudication and the fragility of judicial independence. This is where the biography matters. Rice’s brief legal training did not make him a professional jurist, but it gave him a feel for the mechanics – jurisdiction, charge, forum, sentence, and responsibility – that underpin the story’s conflict. When musical structure meets legal structure, you get something like a casebook in song, with leitmotifs standing in for doctrinal hooks.

“What is Truth? Is Truth Unchanging Law?”

In contemporary international law, “truth” is never the decree of a single official but an outcome reached through procedures – fact-finding, reason-giving, and review – disciplined by rules that constrain power. And while the lyric asks whether truth is “unchanging law”, the international legal order is, in fact, dynamic: it evolves through treaty-making and interpretation, the accretion of international custom, institutional practice, and judicial and quasi-judicial decisions. Even the most settled regimes are clarified and refined over time, as new cases and contexts test their edges.

That said, change does not mean malleability without limits. Some guardrails are enduring: the duties of an Occupying Power to maintain order while respecting existing law; the core guarantees of a fair trial; the absolute prohibition of torture and ill-treatment; and the requirements of judicial independence and individual responsibility. Superstar stages what happens when political calculation tries to outpace those guardrails – when venue becomes a tactic, when crowd pressure seeks to supplant adjudication, and when an official imagines that ritual can wash away legal responsibility. The lesson for modern readers is not that law is static but that its capacity to change operates within a framework that preserves the integrity of process and human dignity.

Musical theatre renders these abstractions concrete by dramatising choice. Each scene in Jesus Christ Superstar turns on a decision point that international law now regulates with increasing precision. If we ask the right questions of the musical score, we see not a frozen “unchanging law” but a living system that adapts and develops – and that still insists, despite politics and spectacle, that some answers remain non-negotiable.

This post was written during a research stay at the National University of Singapore and funded by its Centre for International Law.