Now in its 11th year, the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada’s annual Sol and Florence Kanee Distinguished Lecture Series – scheduled this year for May 16 – has brought to Winnipeg such notable scholars as Martin Gilbert and Deborah Lipstadt and journalists such as Caroline Glick and Avi Shavit.
This year’s presenter may not be quite as well known – outside legal circles, anyway – but nonetheless he has a fitting topic, since this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials.
John Barrett, a law professor St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., has a special interest in Robert Jackson, a former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and, more pertinent to the Kanee Lecture, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
“John Barrett was recommended to us by some judges who heard him speak in Winnipeg last fall at a judicial conference,” says Ilana Abrams, the Jewish Heritage Centre’s general manager. “We were told that he is a fabulous speaker and that we should book him for the Kanee Lecture Series. He may not be as well known as some of our previous speakers, but the topic is interesting and timely.”
Abrams said the series attracts 400 to 800 people, depending on the speaker and topic, and raises $50,000 to $55,000 for the centre’s programs.
“Because Prof. Barrett is not as well known as some of our earlier speakers, we have to work a little harder to sell tickets,” she said. “We are confident, though, that his presentation will be up to the high standards of our previous speakers.”
Barrett’s resume includes working for the Office of the Independent Counsel probing the Iran-Contra scandal in the later years of the Reagan presidency and for the U.S. Justice department in the mid-1990s before assuming his present position.
While Jackson may be little known today to the general public, his rulings are still much studied in American law schools. “In his time, Robert Jackson was considered to be one of the best lawyers in practice in the United States,” Barrett said, “and the best writer to ever sit on the Supreme Court. His writing of opinions is candid and colourful. One idea clearly leads to another.”
Jackson was a self-made man, Barrett said. He never graduated from law school although he did attend for a couple of years. He became a lawyer by apprenticing for his uncle, a practising lawyer. He was brought into government by U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, eventually serving as solicitor general and attorney general before Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1941.
Barrett said president Harry Truman took him away from the bench for a year to be lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
“The Nuremberg Trials were the result of a hard and deliberate choice by the Allies, led by the U.S., to bring the top Nazis to justice for their crimes rather than simply allowing them to be shot,” Barrett said.
“The trials set out an historical record of the Nazi crimes and the Holocaust, and laid the foundation for the international human rights laws that followed and allowed for the prosecution of the Yugoslavian and Rwandan war criminals and the creation of the International Criminal Court.”
In 2003, Barrett edited and published Robert Jackson’s lost manuscript, That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Since then, Barrett has contributed to two books on the Nuremberg Trials and a chapter connected to Jackson on Supreme Court justices and their law clerks. He is currently working on a biography of Jackson.