Nope. Sorry. You get an F for that. You don't know what you are talking about.

Dang! And I suppose you're grading on the curve, too?

In fact the UN codified the foundations on which the cases at Nuremberg were made into the Seven 'Nuremberg Principles'. Those principles became the very foundations of both national and international law, and nations have written or re-written their legal codes based on it. This does not suggest that the league of nations found them 'laughable', as you put it.

Brush up on that reading comprehension, Teach. I said "the others" (by context you shoulda grasped I was referring to other prosecutors) were "almost comically disappointed." That was my impression reading the transcript. Feel free to read it yourself and offer your own interpretation. There was nothing in my post about a "league of nations" finding the rationale offered by the U.S. prosecutors "laughable."

Someone with your familiarity with acadamia no doubt knows that ex post facto law is considered an abomination by jurists and philosophers. (Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the establishment of such laws.) Knowing such things, you should understand why the Nuremberg trials were considered by some (yes, even by some in academia) to be legal travesties.

"[The Nuremberg] war-crimes trials were based upon a complete disregard of sound legal precedents, principles and procedures. The court had no real jurisdiction over the accused or their offenses; it invented ex post facto crimes; it permitted the accusers to act as prosecutors, judges, jury and executioners; and it admitted to the group of prosecutors those who had been guilty of crimes as numerous and atrocious as those with which the accused were charged. Hence, it is not surprising that these trials degraded international jurisprudence as never before in human experience."

Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, Ph.D
Thompson, and Strutz ed., Doenitz at Nuremberg: A Re-appraisal,(Torrance: Institute for Historical Review, 1983) p.148.

"No matter how many books are written or briefs filed, no matter how finely the lawyers analyzed it, the crime for which the Nazis were tried had never been formalized as a crime with the definiteness required by our legal standards, nor outlawed with a death penalty by the international community. By our standards that crime arose under an ex post facto law. Goering et al deserved severe punishment. But their guilt did not justify us in substituting power for principle."

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, (New York: Harper & Row, 1964),p.190.

Its also cited as the intellectual foundation for the modern notion of human rights (Notice VI.B and VI.C).

LOL. It is? Who besides you has made such a ludicrous claim? Source, please!

A notion that the US, UN, and EU tend to put a lot of stock in (even if the US bends them from time to time).

Ever hear tell of a lil concept called "natural law?" Hobbes, Mill, Rousseau, Locke -- any of them ring a bell? You DO know America's founders were big believers in natural law, don't you? And that Jefferson borrowed from Locke when he wrote The Declaration of Independence?

Perhaps you could explain how the Nuremberg Principles "cited as the intellectual foundation for the modern notion of human rights" differs from the intellectual foundation laid by the gentlemen I mentioned. I'd love to hear your learned thoughts on the subject.

In fact, in that we submit to international law (interpol, extradition treaties, etc), we [The US] implement the Seven Nuremberg Principles

I'll ask you the same question I asked David. If the most powerful member of the international community isn't held to account for breaking the law, how does international law differ from the Law of the Jungle?

Furthermore, you seem fundamentally confused on some basic issues. First off, legality is not self-same to what is morally right. Its like saying that the root of all meaning is syntactic. Its a confusion of kind. Law does not in essence reflect moral truths.

It's comments like this that tell me you don't understand the argument, your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. I said nothing in my earlier posts in this thread about what is morally right or of moral truths. Morality has nothing to do with the initial argument I made and yet you continue to somehow misinterpret my comments as confusing morality and legality. Couldja cite the specific sentences I wrote that gave you that impression?