Today in Legal History: Hughes Born, Holocaust Trials Begin & End
On this day in 1910, Charles Evans Hughes was born. A renowned political figure, he twice was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and served as Chief Justice from 1930 to 1941.
On this day in 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, for crimes against humanity in Nazi Germany during World War II, began in Israel. “He sat in a bullet-proof glass dock flanked by two guards specially chosen because their families had not suffered directly at the hands of the Nazis,” the BBC says. Eichmann was found guilty in December and hanged the following year.
On this day in 2000, historian Deborah Lipstadt was vindicated when a judge dismissed a British libel suit brought by a Holocaust denier discussed in a book she had written. The judge found that plaintiff David Irving was “a right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist” and “an active Holocaust denier … anti-Semitic and racist,” recounts the Jewish Women’s Archive.
