Could one imagine that up until the mid-1940s international treaties had been ratified on postal services, copyright protection, and whale hunting, but not on genocide? It was only after the Second World War that the deliberate and systematic destruction of groups was recognised as an international crime. There had not even been a name for this practice, which has existed since the beginning of humanity. The 1948 Genocide Convention, the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations, was a milestone in the international protection of human rights, although several tragedies have shown that mere law is not sufficient to relegate genocide to the scrapheap of history. The initiator of the Convention was not a very well-known man. This article is about the struggle of Raphael Lemkin, who had, with unflagging zeal, devoted his life to the elimination of genocide.

When the Allied victory over the Axis powers is becoming certain, American officials start making plans for the occupation of Germany. In the aftermath of the invasion in 1944, some of these plans are brought to the attention of the Secretary of the Treasury in Roosevelt’s war cabinet, Henry Morgenthau. These plans infuriate him, because he considers them too lenient on Germany, which in his opinion should be reduced to an agrarian economy after its Nazi leadership has been summarily executed. The President at first agrees with this line of action as do most of the members of his cabinet. The only one opposing these ideas is the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, suggesting economic reconstruction and an international tribunal instead. His opposition seems in vain, when Roosevelt and Churchill publicly agree to this course of action towards Germany during a meeting in Quebec. But the ‘Morgenthau plan’ unravels when it is leaked to the press and it causes an uproar. Roosevelt fears for his re-election chances and hastily retreats. But he makes no decision on the issue and Stimson has to wait for his opportunity. It comes in the person of a new President: Harry Truman. He agrees to Stimson’s proposal for an international tribunal and this brings the United States on board of an allied majority for what is later to become the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Beate Sirota has been described as the ‘heroine of Japanese women’s rights’, because she contributed considerably to the inclusion of a forceful provision on the rights of women in the new Constitution of Japan as a member of the Government Section of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), headed by General Douglas MacArthur. Her role was serendipitous, because at first the Americans were not planning such a thorough revision of the Meiji Constitution (1890). Sirota was not a constitutional scholar, let alone an expert on the rights of women. She was hired only because she had spent her youth in Japan and spoke Japanese fluently. But once she got involved in the drafting of a new Constitution, her intimate knowledge of the position of women in Japanese society proved very useful. She proposed elaborate and detailed provisions on women’s rights in order to counter the expected resistance. This strategy turned out to be successful. Although Sirota was not substantially involved in the implementation of article 24, she returned to the United States in 1947. Since its introduction the provision has been a firm anchor for proponents of the emancipation of women in Japan.

Important legal developments are often credited to court decisions. This contribution will firstly discuss the Australian High Court decision in the Mabo case as such. The legal implications of a decision are often emphasised, instead of the actual persons who started the case, as Dutch sociological research has shown. The article will secondly state that in the Mabo case the person Eddy Mabo and his Aboriginal companions were a lot more important. Not that one has to solely think of him and his clansmen as political activists who go to court to change the legal order. The analysis will show that Eddie Mabo c.s. represent a legal culture in its own right. That legal culture has a far much longer history than the two centuries of Anglo-Australian common law. Mabo came to the fore as someone who was entitled by Aboriginal law to bear witness of Aboriginal law. The fact that an Aboriginal actor as such is the pure actuality of law is hardly recognised by the Anglo-Australian legal culture.

The German lawyer / labour law professor Hugo Sinzheimer (1875-1945) has, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, contributed significantly to the legal recognition of the ‘collective labour agreement’. The imperative character of CLA provisions, now widely accepted all over the world, required a paradigmatic turn in the dominant private law perspective on labour relations. The paper tries to specify what made him able and prone to do this, both by reconstructing the legal and political discussion in Germany and the Netherlands and by relating elements of the process to social-scientific theories of institutional and intellectual innovation. I argue that his combination of commitments in various fields (legal practice, science, politics) allowed him to span the gap between the fields of labour relations and state law and to contribute to the constitutionalisation of labour relations.

This article paints Henk Leenen as the godfather of Dutch health law. Godfather because Leenendesigned his own version of health law, a version that is characterized by an emphasis on autonomy of the patient. And godfather because Leenen was one of the founders of the Dutch Association of Health Law and for many years the editor of its periodical. He succeeded to bind almost all health law scholars to this organization and his way of seeing health law. The article illustrates Leenen’s influence by describing his reading of autonomy in health law, by outlining his informal and formal position in the health law landscape and by sketching the coming into being and the content of two important laws: the Law on medical contracts and the Law on physician assisted death (‘euthanasia’).

Derkje Hazewinkel-Suringa entered law studies only after marriage and fulfilling about fifteen years of motherhood duty. Once at the university however, she rapidly became a student-researcher, delivered a PhD dissertation on ownership transfer and was appointed as the first female law professor in 1932, at the age of 42. Her professorship was in a remarkably different field, namely criminal law. Twenty years later she published the Introduction to the Study of Criminal Law, which would become the basis for criminal law teaching in the Netherlands for decades. A major reason behind this success was that the book, emphasizing active study of the law rather than passive reproduction, coincided with the general sprit of the post war era. Besides her scholarly work in which balance and synthesis were the major features, Hazewinkel-Suringa was a very outspoken actor in matters political. In 1936, when virtually the whole country was trying to accommodate the rise of fascism in the mighty neighbouring country, she became member of an anti-fascism committee. In 1938 she wrote a plea to the minister of Justice to allow entry of German-Jewish children into the country. During the German occupation (1940-1945) she proposed to close the university because of the dismissal of Jewish professors. She continued her protests against the social mainstream after the war, e.g. writing against the reintroduction of the death penalty (primarily focused on collaborators with the German regime). Hazewinkel-Suringa’s acts of individual courage could not make a difference in the overall political atmosphere of these times.

With the help of a model of policy formation designed by John Kingdon, we seek to map the actors in the previous cases of legal change and to establish the way in which they performed their key role and what conditions allowed them to do that. It appears that only two of the actors are insiders, government officials. The rest are outsiders. According to Kingdon’s model, a particular kind of actors is most likely to play a key role in policy change. He calls them ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and they typically are experts in a particular field of policy, who spend time, energy and money to promote a proposal they favour. They spring into action when they seize an opportunity to push their proposal on the agenda of the decision-makers. In our small collection of actors, Lemkin, Sinzheimer and Leenen are prototypical ‘policy entrepreneurs’. The others do not fit this profile, but played an influential role nevertheless.