The ‘Unusual’ Trial of Former Concentration Camp Guard Bruno Dey

This paper discusses the trial against Bruno Dey, who was an ss guard at the concentration camp Stutthof in 1944 and 1945. The accused was 92 years old at the time the trial was opened before a juvenile division of the regional court in Hamburg in 2019. The trial ended with a conviction and a sentence of two years on probation. On the first day of the main hearing, the presiding judge remarked that it was an ‘unusual trial’. This expression is a leitmotif for this paper. The first section explains the historical and legal context of the trial. The paper then provides an account of the opening session, the testimonies of the accused and the witnesses, as well the judgment.

CommentsLon L. Fuller: Private Ordering and Mediation

One of the first major law review articles on mediation, published in 1971, Lon L. Fuller’s Mediation—Its Forms and Functions, is an important piece of dispute resolution scholarship for several reasons. While this commentary focuses upon the article’s discussion of private social ordering, Fuller’s discussion foreshadows three major dispute resolution developments. In his discussion of the negotiation process, Fuller reveals a remarkable understanding of negotiation as he explains the difficulty of timing the disclosure of information and the gains of reciprocity. Today we view this in terms of the Negotiator’s Dilemma—which Lax and Sebenius famously wrote about fifteen years later. Similarly, his discussion of mediation as a means of assisting with the dissolution of marriage presages the first use of mediation in child-custody disputes by approximately ten years. Finally, he even hints at the demise of the joint opening session in mediation when he describes the opening sessions of collective bargaining, with or without a mediator’s assistance, as serving “only a ceremonial and ritualistic purpose” (p. 322). If that’s all it’s for, why not get rid of it? As interesting as it is to find the hints of these developments, a much more integral factor in the article’s importance is Fuller’s stature as one of the preeminent legal theorists of the twentieth century. According to his biographer, Fuller was “one of the four most important American legal theorists of the last hundred years” (Summers, p. 1) and “the greatest proceduralist in the in the history of legal history” (Summers, p. 151). His jurisprudence, which formed the basis of mid-twentieth-century secular natural law, argued that the purposes of law, the internal reasoning within law, and law’s internal morality must be considered when one is engaged in legal analysis. Not only did these notions become central to “thinking like a lawyer” (Powers, p. 221), they also were to be applied to legal processes, including mediation, not solely to abstract notions of law....