Lawrence Douglas

Lawrence R. Douglas (born October 18, 1959) is an American legal scholar. He teaches in the department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he holds the James J. Grosfield Professorship.^[1] He is an author of journalism, fiction, and nonfiction books.

Douglas received an A.B. from Brown University in 1982, a A.M. from Columbia University in 1986, and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989.

Much of Douglas's nonfiction has focused on legal responses to state-sponsored atrocities. His two novels have focused on the question of Jewish identity.

In 2013, Douglas wrote about Guantanamo Bay detainee Abd al-Nashiri for Harper's Magazine.^[2] Douglas reviews books on legal topics for the Times Literary Supplement^[3] and is a contributing writer for The Guardian.^[4]

He has received fellowships^[5] from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and the Carnegie Corporation.^[6] In 2022, he was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.^[7]

Douglas has appeared in several documentaries, including The Accountant of Auschwitz (2018),^[8] the TV mini-series The Devil Next Door (2019),^[9] the National Geographic documentary Nazis at Nuremberg: The Lost Testimony (2023),^[10] and the BBC's The Devil's Confession: the Lost Eichmann Tapes (2023).^[11]

His book The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial was a New York Times Editors' Choice book for 2016.^[12]

His 2020 book Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020 predicted many of Donald Trump's strategies for attempting to hold onto power.^[13][14]

Douglas lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.^[15]

Douglas has published two novels. The Catastrophist,^[16] about a professor struggling with fatherhood, was listed on Kirkus Reviews' best books of 2006 and shared a Silver Prize in fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.^[17]

The Vices, about a troubled philosopher,^[18] was listed as a best book of 2011 by New York Magazine^[19] and the New Statesman.^[20]

• Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. Twelve Books. 2020. ISBN 978-1-5387-5187-9.
• The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial. Princeton University Press. 2016. ISBN 978-1-4008-7315-9.
• The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. Yale University Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0-300-10984-9.
• Lawrence Douglas; Alexander George (2007). Sense and Nonsensibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4165-8482-7.

Editor

• Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2013). Law and War. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781625343925.
• Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2014). Law and the Utopian Imagination. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804790819.
• Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2019). Criminals and Enemies. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 9781625343925.

Novels

• The Vices. Other Press. 2011. ISBN 978-1-59051-416-0.
• The Catastrophist. Other Press. 2006. ISBN 978-1-5905-1219-7.

• Judging the Courts: Wikinews interviews Prof. Lawrence Douglas.
• Faculty site at Amherst College.
• Lawrence Douglas in "The Accountant of Auschwitz."
• Lawrence Douglas's Op-Eds in The Guardian.