Michael Bryant
Professor Bryant is a Professor of History and Legal Studies specializing in the impact of the Holocaust on law, human rights, German criminal law, and international humanitarian law. He also served as an Assistant Staff Judge Advocate in the U.S. Air Force. Dr. Bryant came to Bryant in 2007 after working as a lawyer and Professor of History and Criminal Justice at the University of Toledo and The Ohio State University. In addition, he has taught for Creighton University Law School and the National Judicial College. Dr. Bryant has written multiple books, including Eyewitness to Genocide, Confronting the Good Death and A World History of War Crimes, which will be published in December 2015. His book Eyewitness to Genocide is a history of the major death camp trials (excluding Auschwitz) held in West Germany in the 1960s. The book won the Book of the Year award from the American National Chapter of the International Association of Penal Law in 2014.
Dr. Bryant's research and work allows him to travel to Germany frequently. His passion for Germany and history grew after being an exchange student and living there for three years as a military lawyer for the Air Force. Each summer he teaches a four-week course in the impact of the Holocaust on law for Creighton University in Nuremberg, Germany. In connection with this program, he travels with students through Germany, Poland, and The Netherlands, studying international law and Holocaust history. |
Title
Professor of History and Legal Studies History Program Curriculum Coordinator Office Suite C |
Languages
English and German Research Area Human Rights, International Criminal Law and the Impact of the Holocaust on Legal Systems |
Courses
Western Legal Tradition History, Law & the Holocaust Education Ohio State University Emory University |
A World History of War Crimes
From Antiquity to the Present A World History of War Crimes provides a truly global history of war crimes and the involvement of the legal systems faced with these acts. Documenting the long historical arc traced by human efforts to limit warfare, from codes of war in antiquity designed to maintain a religiously conceived cosmic order to the gradual use in the modern age of the criminal trial as a means of enforcing universal norms, this book provides a comprehensive one-volume account of war and the laws that have governed conflict since the dawn of world civilizations. Throughout his narrative, Michael Bryant locates the origin and evolution of the law of war in the interplay between different cultures. While showing that no single philosophical idea underlay the law of war in world history, this volume also proves that war in global civilization has rarely been an anarchic free-for-all. Rather, from its beginnings warfare has been subject to certain constraints defined by the unique needs and cosmological understandings of the cultures that produce them. Only in late modernity has law assumed its current international humanitarian form. The criminalization of war crimes in international courts today is only the most recent development of the ancient theme of constraining when and how war may be fought. |
Contact: |
If you have any questions about Global Studies or Professor Bryant's research, feel free to contact him through email or attend office hours.
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