Book Talk: Nuremberg's Citizen Prosecutor

Join the Center for Human Rights and International Justice as Professor Gregory Gordon presents his new book, which chronicles the remarkable life of Benjamin Ferencz. Ferencz is known as one of the twentieth century’s great warriors for justice, from Nuremberg to the first trial of the International Criminal Court. 

This event is co-sponosred with the Stanford University Libraries.

About the author: 

Gregory S. Gordon is a Professor of Law at Peking University School of Transnational Law. Not long after earning undergraduate and law degrees from Berkeley, he served as an attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on the landmark “Media” cases, the first international post-Nuremberg incitement prosecutions of media executives, earning a commendation from U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. He subsequently worked with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), serving, in sequence, as a street crime, white collar crime, organized crime and then human rights prosecutor (the latter for the Office of Special Investigations, the so-called “Nazi Hunters Unit”). He has tried 24 cases, 23 to a favorable verdict. Professor Gordon was detailed by DOJ to Sierra Leone to conduct a post-civil war justice assessment and served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. From 2006 to 2014, he was a professor at UND Law and served as Professor Gordon is the author of Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford University Press, 2017) and his new monograph Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor: Benjamin Ferencz and the Birth of International Justice, was published by the University of Virginia Press in November 2025. He is pursuing a PhD at Stockholm University Faculty of Law proposing fixes to a broken atrocity victim justice framework based on the doctrinal and procedural innovations developed by Ben Ferencz during his career. Since 2023, Professor Gordon has served as an advisor to Ukrainian prosecutors related to Russian war crimes arising from the invasion of Ukraine. In 2025, he was chosen to receive the “World of Upstanders Award” by the NGO World Without Genocide, in recognition of his life’s work on behalf of protecting victims of gross human rights violations.