Lawrence Douglas


Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Life

He is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School.
Douglas is the author of works of both . His nonfiction has focused on legal responses to state-sponsored atrocity. examined the Nuremberg, Eichmann, Barbie, and Zundel trials as examples of what Douglas calls "didactic legality": using criminal trials as tools of historical instruction and memory construction. His most recent book, , chronicles the lengthiest case to arise from the Holocaust and one of the most famous cases of possible mistaken identity in legal history. The Right Wrong Man was named a New York Times Editors' Choice for 2016.
His two novels have focused on the question of Jewish identity. The Catastrophist was named a best book of 2006 by Kirkus and received the 2006 Silver Prize in General Fiction at the Independent Publishers' Book Awards. The Vices was named a best book of 2011 by New York Magazine and the New Statesmen, and was a finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award.
He has published two books of humor, Sense and Nonsensibility, a collection of short sketches parodying the contemporary life of the mind written with his Amherst colleague, Alexander George; and The Girl with the Sturgeon Tattoo, a parody of Stieg Larsson's bestselling trilogy that he wrote under the pseudonym Lars Arffssen.
In 2013, Douglas wrote about Guantánamo detainee Abd al-Nashiri for Harper's magazine. Douglas is also a regular reviewer of books on legal topics for the Times Literary Supplement and a regular contributor to The Guardian.
Douglas is the recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and the Carnegie Corporation. He has served as a visiting professor of law at the University of London and at Humboldt Universität, Berlin.

Works

;Editor
;Novels