Judgment. Responsibility. Guilt. Crimes. Justice. Throughout The Memory of Justice, Marcel Ophuls’s sprawling 1976 jeremiad on the Nuremberg trials, these are the terms that spring into action in nearly every scene. I have watched this film dozens of times; I have devoted countless hours to taking notes and rewinding key moments and sleeping and dreaming […]

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On June 28, 2007, Don Siegelman made his final appearance in U.S. District Court Judge Mark Everett Fuller’s courtroom. The former secretary of state, attorney general, lieutenant governor, and governor of Alabama was in leg-irons, handcuffs, and a jailhouse jumpsuit, as directed by the judge. Appointed to the bench by George W. Bush (then resigning […]

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Universally acclaimed poet Carolyn Forché is famous for “poetry of witness,” a term she first coined in her groundbreaking anthology, Against Forgetting. Her honors include a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for crafting her poetry as a “means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities […]

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Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. A MacArthur fellow, she is the author of two poetry collections, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), and Post Colonial Love Poem, due from Graywolf Press in March […]

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When a well-known person denounces a specific group of people—claiming for instance they don’t deserve full citizenship, or they are a threat to the nation—the result can be a violent act against any person perceived to be in the targeted group. How do we know this? Sadly, the answer emerges from the horrific mass murders […]

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