Sense and Nonsensibility

Lawrence Douglas is an American legal scholar, novelist and essayist who teaches at Amherst College, where he is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought. He has written widely on war-crimes trials, the legal treatment of mass atrocity and the role of memory and evidence in postwar justice, and his journalism has appeared in The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Harper's Magazine and The New York Times. His academic books include "The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust" (Yale University Press, 2001), a study of how courts from Nuremberg to the Eichmann trial to the John Demjanjuk proceedings have struggled to handle crimes that exceed the categories of ordinary criminal law. He returned to the same territory in "The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial" (Princeton, 2016), which follows the decades-long American and German efforts to prosecute Demjanjuk and uses the case to examine the limits and possibilities of late-stage Holocaust justice. Douglas is also a fiction writer with a comic streak. "Sense and Nonsensibility," co-written with Alexander George and published in 2004, is a collection of satirical essays and parodies aimed at academic culture, contemporary politics and the small absurdities of intellectual life. He followed it with the campus-novel comedy "The Catastrophist" (2007) and "The Vices" (2011), a literary novel longlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize that uses the disappearance of a charismatic philosophy professor as a frame for a study of friendship and self-deception. His work crosses an unusual range — from rigorous legal scholarship on the Holocaust to comic fiction about academic life — but it is held together by a consistent interest in how people construct, defend and dismantle the stories they tell about themselves.