Justice Breyer Sounds Hopeful Note at Holocaust Museum

Wall Street Journal
May 17, 2011

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Tuesday capped the National Days of Remembrance, the congressionally-mandated commemoration of the Holocaust, by focusing on a legal legacy stretching from the Nuremberg Tribunal to present-day efforts to hold war criminals accountable, such as the International Criminal Court.

“I come here as a judge and a Jew,” Justice Breyer said in a keynote address at a Capitol ceremony sponsored by the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in part to remember “that the Holocaust story ended with a fair trial.”

Justice Breyer recalled that the late Justice Robert Jackson called his service as chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, which tried 24 surviving Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity, “infinitely more important than my work on the Supreme Court.”

Justice Jackson had opened his case by telling the world that “the wrongs we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

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