Professor Michael Bazyler: “Hitler’s Willing Business Partners and the Search for Holocaust Justice in the United States”
About the Event
The Holocaust was both the greatest mass murder and the greatest theft in history. This lecture will discuss how America’s civil justice system provided a measure of long-overdue justice to Holocaust victims and heirs and how this U.S. litigation still continues 77 years after the end of WWII. We examine claims for the return of Nazi-looted art, stolen Jewish real property in Europe, Holocaust-era insurance policies, slave labor, and bank deposits held by Swiss banks. Our focus will be on both past and ongoing litigation, including 2 recent Nazi-looted art cases before the U.S. Supreme Court: Phillip v Germany (decided in 2021), and Cassirer v Spain (oral argument heard in January 2022, with an opinion forthcoming). The fight for justice never ends and American courts remain the primary forum for this struggle.
Registration
Please register to receive the Zoom link in advance of the lecture.
Speaker Bio
Michael Bazyler is professor of law and the 1939 Law Scholar in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies. He is holder of previous fellowships at Harvard Law School and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In fall 2006, he was a Research Fellow at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority of Israel) and the holder of the Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Chair for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism and the Holocaust. Before joining Chapman in 2008, he was a professor for 25 years at Whittier Law School. He received his B.A. from UCLA and his JD from USC.
Professor Bazyler is the author of seven books and more than two dozen law review articles, book chapters and essays on subjects covering Law and the Holocaust, restitution following genocide and other mass atrocities, public international law, international human rights law, and international trade law and comparative law. His work has been published in such journals as The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Kansas Law Review, Arizona Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, University of Richmond Law Review, Stanford Journal of International Law, Berkeley Journal of International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, and Fordham Journal of International Law.
His book, Holocaust, Genocide and the Law: A Quest for Justice in a Post-Holocaust World (Oxford University Press) is a winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award. His writings have been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has testified in Congress before the House Reform Committee on the subject of Holocaust restitution. He has also been interviewed by CNN, 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, ABC News, Voice of America, the Australian Broadcasting Company, National Public Radio and the BBC. Bazyler has also delivered the Austin Owen Annual Lecture at the University of Richmond, the Feibel Family Annual Lecture at Ohio State University and the Einspruch Annual Lecture at the University of Texas, Dallas.
Supporters
Academic Enrichment Fund, The Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin