A Catastrophe for Justice? The Issue of Rule of Law and Retribution in the Transnational Legal Debate at the End of the First World War

In 1914 German classical philologist Hermann Diels called the beginning of the First World War „a catastrophe for scholarship”. Sure enough, this global conflict in most cases formed the end of a long-time collaboration of legal scholars, who had tried to create international norms for transnational disputes. Contributing articles to newspapers and journals most of the men involved joined their national war efforts claiming that their country was legally right, while the enemy was at fault. The presentation at hand will deal with the issues of the rule of law and retribution in the debate amongst legal scholars that resumed at the end of the First World War. It furthermore wonders to what extent this debate influenced the discussions on penalties at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In a transnational perspective the focus will be on developments in Great Britain, France, the United States as well as the German and Ottoman Empire.