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On October 5, 1946, Senator Robert Taft in a speech at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, criticized the legal justification and the deterrence value of the just concluded first Nuremberg trial. Taft spoke before most of the important documents from the trial had been published, including the report of the London Conference which established Nuremberg's legal framework and procedures, the official transcripts ofthe daily court proceedings, the volumes of documents, and later testimony by participants. This evidence consists almost entirely of arguments, and will be employed as a reference standard to judge the merits of Taft's criticism. The method used is Rowland's functional approach to evaluating arguments. The verdict is that Nuremberg was a miscarriage of justice.
On October 5, 1946, Senator Robert Taft spoke at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, as part of a three-day convocation on "The Heritage and Responsibility of the English-Speaking Peoples." The topic of Taft's speech was Anglo-American law and justice, a subject he viewed with much concern. Taft began by calling for "equal justice because it is an essential of individual liberty. Unless there is law, and unless there is an impartial tribunal to administer the law, no man can be really free" (p. 157). In recent years, Taft noted, events were weakening these "ideals of justice and equality... [making] every man ... subject to the arbitrary discretion of his ruler or some subordinate government official" (pp. 160; 157). In domestic affairs, Taft cited agencies like the Office of Price Administration and its control of wages and prices, a situation which involved "granting arbitrary power and denying equal justice" (p. 161). In foreign affairs, he referred to the agreements made during World War II with the British and Soviets at Teheran, Moscow and Yalta-"secret agreements distributing the territory of the earth in accordance with power and expediency" rather than with the "rule of law" (p. 167). But Taft saved his strongest attacks for the recently completed Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg-attacks that, as one authority puts it, made him "probably the best known" critic of the trial (Bosch, p. 73).
Altogether, Taft had four legal criticisms of the trial, three of which consisted of the use of arbitrary power to curb individual rights, while the fourth was...