Paper's abstract

Christophe Willmann, A Judicial Contribution to the Debate on Memory
The so-called Memory laws, declarative and symbolic, have a republican and pedagogic aim: remind contemporaries the horrors committed yesterday (slavery, genocide, deportation, forced work) to make sure they do not happen again. For a decade, the legislator paid attention to this duty of memory, usually answering it effectively, but sometimes also with clumsiness. The judge has also been called upon in the memory angle, mostly in criminal matters (Bousquet, Barbie, Touvier, Papon cases…). Other realms have been spotted (World War II, colonization), using other legal techniques (administrative law, social law…) which synthesis suggests a “memory justice”, at the crossroad of private, public or even constitutional law.

Key Words : Memory law, WWII, colonization, genocide
t. 50, 2007 : p. 189-212

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