G. Edward White Examines Noted Jurist and Chief Nuremberg Prosecutor
Robert H. Jackson, a Supreme Court justice perhaps best known as the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, is the subject of a new book from Professor G. Edward White of the University of Virginia School of Law.
“Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment,” available now from Oxford University Press, explores the meteoric rise of “a major figure in American legal and constitutional history,” according to White, who at the same time was “not well understood and maybe to some extent misunderstood.”
The lack of scholarship on the life and work of Jackson was a key reason White said he was interested in writing the book.
“There really hadn’t been a biography of him since 1958, and that biography was written by a person that was very much a devotee of Jackson,” he said, noting that it was “pretty informed, but it really wasn’t very analytical.”
White had researched Jackson before for his book “The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges,” which includes a feature on the justice.
“I had found him a very interesting subject,” he said.
While Jackson had not been the focus of a full scholarly examination in decades, he did leave behind an extensive trove of papers, held at the Library of Congress, which White believed could form the basis of a new book.
Read more
