Law Commons^™

Could This Train Make It Through: The Law And Strategy Of The Gold Train Case, Charles Tiefer, Jonathan W. Cuneo, Annie Reiner

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1944-45, the Nazis seized personal belongings of the Hungarian Jewish population and dispatched some of the most valuable of them on a train. The United States Army took control of this "Gold Train" and gave reassurances that it would keep the valuables safe. However, the items were plundered by individual soldiers, including officers, and diverted to various uses. After decades of dormancy, a Presidential Commission exposed the facts, but the government still did not right the wrong — until there was litigation.

The "Gold Train" case (Rosner v. United States) represents a measure of justice for the victimized community …

Review Of A Final Accounting, Holocaust Survivors And Swiss Banks, Adeen Postar

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review (Reviewing Leonard Orland's A Final Accounting), Adeen Postar

All Faculty Scholarship

Leonard Orland is the Oliver Ellsworth Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. He has written a fine, if a bit unwieldy, book that traces the sad history of money and other assets deposited in supposedly sacrosanct Swiss banks by European Jews during the Nazi era to its long overdue resolution by the American justice system. The book provides background and perspective on how and why the $12.1 billion in pre-war dollars (about $250 trillion today) of financial assets of Holocaust victims disappeared into thin air in the years following World War II. These assets were given over to …

Defending Truth: Legal And Psychological Aspects Of Holocaust Denial, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

From the still-burning embers of the Holocaust we have come once again to learn the terrible truth, that the power of Evil still lurks among the nations of the world, and cannot be underestimated. Nor can the effect of the spoken and written word, which in modern times must be taken in tandem with the violence of terrorism. Part I describes the background and nature of Holocaust denial, tracing the Nazis' adoption of a plan for the A "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" through the post-War Nuremberg Trials to the present day. Part II examines the tension between free …

Holocaust Denial And The First Amendment: The Quest For Truth In A Free Society, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

From the ashes of the Holocaust we have come once again to learn the terrible truth, that the power of Evil cannot be underestimated. Nor can the effect of the spoken and written word. It has been but a half-century since the liberation of Nazi death camps, a little more than a decade since the First International Conference on the Holocaust and Human Rights, and a few short years since the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum first put on display its documentation of horror. Yet today that form of historical revisionism popularly called "Holocaust denial" abounds worldwide in all its …

In Defense Of Group-Libel Laws, Or Why The First Amendment Should Not Protect Nazis, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

The author discusses group libel laws, and the underlying problems when free speech is used as a defense by those who would defame specific racial or ethnic groups and/or minorities. The topic is further explained in reference to various state laws, and the subsequent court cases extant at the time of the article's writing which defined the issue in terms of law. References are also made to such laws in countries other than the United States for the sake of comparison.