Absented at the Creation: Nuremberg Women and International Criminal Justice

Authors

Diane Marie Amann, University of Georgia School of LawFollow

Previously posted to SSRN. This book and chapter are available for purchase from Oxford University Press.

Abstract

Women seldom surface in conventional accounts of the many war crimes trials that took place after World War II. Yet as this chapter shows, hundreds of women lawyers and other professionals were present, thus helping to lay the foundations of an international criminal justice project that continues to this day. Combining methodologies of narrative with theories sounding in global legal history and feminist scholarship and discussing what it reveals as dances of absence-presence, visible-invisible, and inclusion-exclusion, this chapter first examines how and why women were absented and then surfaces their contributions. It concludes with a look at contemporary international legal practice.

Repository Citation

Diane Marie Amann, Absented at the Creation: Nuremberg Women and International Criminal Justice in The Oxford Handbook of Women and International Law (J. Jarpa Dawuni et al., eds.) 69-82 (2026),
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1737