Book Symposium on ‘Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor’: Law Is Made by People – Gordon’s Ferencz and the Case for Legal Biography

[Mark Klamberg is Professor of Public International Law at Stockholm University, chief editor of the Commentary on the Law of the International Criminal Court, a board member of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He authored Evidence in International Criminal Trials and Power and Law in International Society.]

Introduction: A Different Kind of Legal Scholarship

When legal scholars write, we typically operate within well-established genres. We draft journal articles dissecting treaty provisions, monographs analyzing doctrinal developments, or casebooks organizing jurisprudence into pedagogical frameworks. The rules of engagement are familiar: cite your sources, construct your argument, anticipate counter-arguments, and let the law speak.

But Gregory Gordon’s biography of Benjamin Ferencz invites us into a fundamentally different scholarly enterprise — one that demands equal parts legal acumen, historical sensitivity, narrative craft, and archival perseverance. As someone who has recently ventured into adjacent territory with my own book Genocide: Sweden and the Battle over a Concept (Folkmord: Sverige och kampen om ett begrepp Fri Tanke, 2025) — a work that similarly sits at the intersection of law, history, and public debate — I find myself well-positioned to reflect on what this kind of scholarship requires, what it offers, and where its challenges lie.

I should be transparent about my relationship to this work: I serve as Gregory Gordon’s PhD supervisor. His doctoral project — currently underway — examines the legal thought of Benjamin Ferencz more systematically, and sits alongside the biography as a complementary scholarly enterprise. It is the biography, not the dissertation, that is the subject of this symposium contribution. I took on the role of supervisor when the project was already substantially developed — familiar enough with its evolution to assess it with some depth, and sufficiently removed from its origins to, I hope, retain critical distance.

The Subject: Why Ferencz Matters

Before turning to method, the subject deserves acknowledgment. Benjamin Ferencz is one of the most consequential figures in the history of international criminal law, yet he remains insufficiently known even among legal scholars. At twenty-seven years old, he stood in Courtroom 600 in Nuremberg to deliver the prosecution’s opening statement in what has been described as “the biggest murder trial in history” — the Einsatzgruppen case, concerning SS killing units responsible for more than 1.5 million deaths during the Holocaust.

What makes Ferencz’s story extraordinary is not merely his youth or the gravity of the trial. It is the arc of his engagement: as General Patton’s lead war crimes field investigator; one of the chief prosecutors at Nuremberg; pioneering reparations efforts and helping negotiate the landmark treaty between West Germany, Israel, and Jewish civil society; a driving force behind the creation of the International Criminal Court and how he joined the ICC prosecution for the Court’s first trial as the last living Nuremberg prosecutor

No other individual participated in all phases of international criminal justice’s birth and early development. That alone justifies a major biography.

Biography vs. Doctrinal Scholarship: A Methodological Reflection

Legal scholarship rarely takes the individual life as its primary unit of analysis — preferring instead the systemic, the generalizable, the doctrinal. Yet this instinct, however useful in its proper domain, can impoverish our understanding of how law actually develops.

Law does not emerge from abstract reasoning alone. It is made by people — people with biographies, traumas, ambitions, and moral convictions. Normally we are more comfortable with rules than with lives. The Einsatzgruppen trial did not happen because international law had logically evolved to that point. It happened in part because a young immigrant from Hell’s Kitchen, shaped by poverty and antisemitic persecution, had the single-mindedness to gather evidence from Nazi archives at a moment when those records risked being catalogued, shelved, and forgotten, and the audacity to prosecute twenty-four defendants largely on his own.

Biographical and historical legal scholarship offers something that doctrinal writing cannot easily provide. Where doctrine analyses rules and their application, biography and history ask a prior and perhaps more fundamental question: why did those rules take the form they did? Doctrinal scholarship operates, necessarily, in the present tense of law — taking existing frameworks as its starting point. Historical and biographical scholarship recovers what doctrine tends to obscure: that legal development was never inevitable, that different choices were available, and that the law we have is the product of particular people acting in particular moments. In privileging the actor and the context over the text, this kind of scholarship illuminates the contingent and the particular rather than reaching for the generalizable. And in doing so, it opens legal scholarship to something else: the possibility of reaching audiences beyond the specialist — readers who may never open a law journal but who can be drawn into the story of how justice, haltingly and imperfectly, came to be. Both modes are necessary. Legal scholarship has historically underinvested in one of them.

What Gordon Does Differently: The Archive as Foundation

What distinguishes Gordon’s biography from previous treatments of Ferencz — and from much legal-historical writing generally — is the depth and breadth of his archival foundation. With full access to Ferencz’s personal papers, Gordon’s account is grounded in an exceptional range of primary sources. Drawing on Ferencz’s personal diaries, he is able to reconstruct not just what happened but how Ferencz experienced and reasoned through it in real time — the inner life of a man building international justice almost from scratch. Private correspondence reveals the behind-the-scenes negotiations and relationships that shaped his career in ways that no official record could capture. Trial transcripts allow for a precise and vivid reconstruction of courtroom dynamics, bringing the reader into the room in a way that secondary accounts rarely achieve. And throughout, Gordon situates Ferencz’s work within the broader political and diplomatic landscape of postwar Europe, ensuring that the individual story never loses sight of the historical forces surrounding it.

Comparing Approaches: Gordon’s Biography and My Own Folkmord

My own recent book Genocide: Sweden and the Battle over a Concept operates in a related but distinct register. Like Gordon, I engage with legal history and with the way legal concepts are contested, constructed, and deployed. Like Gordon, I write for an audience that extends beyond the specialist legal academy.

But the differences are instructive:

Gordon’s access to Ferencz’s personal papers enabled a depth of biographical reconstruction that is simply not available to most legal scholars writing about living or recently deceased figures. 

Gordon’s project required years of archival immersion. My project required a different kind of engagement: tracking how a legal concept travels across political and cultural contexts, how it is weaponized, diluted, and contested. Both are legitimate scholarly enterprises, but they demand different skills and different temperaments.

Gordon writes a biography that can be read by specialists and general readers alike — the “page-turning” quality the publisher advertises is not incidental but integral to the project. Legal biography at its best democratizes legal history, making it accessible to citizens who have a stake in understanding how international justice was built.

Both projects reflect a conviction that legal scholars have an obligation to engage publics beyond the academy, particularly on questions as morally urgent as genocide and international criminal justice.

The Role of the Individual vs. the Concept

Gordon’s organizing principle is a life. My organizing principle is a concept. Both choices carry methodological implications. The biographical approach risks hagiography — the danger of allowing admiration for the subject to distort analytical judgment. The conceptual approach risks abstraction — the danger of losing sight of the human stakes of definitional battles.

Gordon is clearly aware of the hagiographic risk. His access to private papers allows him to show Ferencz in full — not merely as a heroic figure but as a complex human being — pioneering in his work, and no less human for it.

Drawing on both Gordon’s example and my own experience, I offer the following reflections for legal scholars considering biographical or historical projects:

1. Treat the Archive as Primary, Not Supplementary

The temptation for legally trained scholars is to treat primary sources as illustrations of arguments already formed. Gordon’s approach inverts this: the archive generates the argument. Spend time with the documents before you know what you think.

2. Develop Narrative Skills Deliberately

Legal writing trains us to be precise and economical, but not necessarily to sustain narrative across hundreds of pages. Read biographies outside law. Study how historians construct scenes. The “page-turning” quality Gordon achieves is a craft skill, not an accident.

3. Maintain Analytical Rigor Alongside Narrative Engagement

The risk of narrative is that it seduces. A compelling story can substitute for rigorous argument. Gordon succeeds because he never loses the legal scholar’s analytical eye even while reconstructing scenes from Ferencz’s diaries. The two modes must coexist.

4. Situate the Legal in the Historical and Political

Ferencz’s achievements cannot be understood outside the postwar political context — the Cold War pressures, the diplomatic negotiations over reparations, the institutional politics of the ICC’s creation. Legal scholars writing history must resist the temptation to treat law as self-contained.

5. Consider Your Audience from the Beginning

If you are writing for specialists only, you can write like a specialist. If you are writing — as both Gordon and I have tried to do — for a broader public, you must make choices about terminology, structure, and tone from the outset. This is not a concession to popularization; it is a different form of intellectual seriousness.

6. Be Patient with Access

Gordon’s project was enabled by his status as the first scholar with full access to Ferencz’s papers. This kind of access is rarely immediate. Building relationships with subjects, families, and archives takes time. The depth it enables is worth the investment.

Assessment: A Landmark Contribution

Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor is a significant achievement. It is the biography of Ferencz that scholars and students will turn to for years to come. Gordon brings to the project his own experience as a former war crimes prosecutor — he understands from the inside what Ferencz faced — combined with the scholar’s commitment to evidence and argument.

The book matters not only as biography but as a contribution to our understanding of how international criminal justice was built: not through inevitable institutional evolution, but through the stubborn, creative, morally driven work of particular individuals operating in particular historical moments.

For legal scholars, it is also a reminder that our field has a history — and that recovering that history, in all its contingency and human complexity, is itself a form of legal scholarship deserving of the same seriousness we bring to doctrinal analysis.

Benjamin Ferencz’s life is, among other things, a story about what one person committed to justice can accomplish. Gregory Gordon’s biography is, among other things, a story about what one lawyer committed to getting it right can accomplish with access, patience, and craft.