Lawrence R. Douglas (born October 18, 1959) is an American legal scholar. He teaches in the department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he holds the James J. Grosfeld Professorship. He is an author of journalism, fiction, and nonfiction books.
Education Douglas received an A.B. from Brown University in 1982, a A.M. from Columbia University in 1986, and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1989. At Yale, he was co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities.
Career Much of Douglas's nonfiction has focused on legal responses to state-sponsored atrocities. His two novels have focused on the question of Jewish identity.
In 2013, Douglas wrote about Guantanamo Bay detainee Abd al-Nashiri for Harper's Magazine. Douglas reviews books on legal topics for the Times Literary Supplement and is a contributing writer for The Guardian.
He has received senior fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and the Carnegie Corporation. In 2022, he received a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, where he was a Daimler Fellow. In 2026, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Douglas has appeared in several documentaries, including The Accountant of Auschwitz (2018), the TV mini-series The Devil Next Door (2019), the National Geographic documentary Nazis at Nuremberg: The Lost Testimony (2023), the BBC's The Devil's Confession: the Lost Eichmann Tapes (2023), and Au coeur de l'histoire: le procès de Nuremberg (Arte, 2025).
His book The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial was a New York Times Editors' Choice book for 2016.
His 2020 book Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020 predicted many of Donald Trump's strategies for attempting to hold onto power.
Personal life Douglas lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his wife, nonfiction author Nancy Pick.
Fiction Honors Douglas has published two novels. The Catastrophist, about a professor struggling with fatherhood, was listed on Kirkus Reviews''' best books of 2006 and shared a Silver Prize in fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.The Vices, about a troubled philosopher, was listed as a best book of 2011 by New York Magazine and the New Statesman. Writing in Book Forum, Edward Park called Douglas “one of our finest novelists” and described the book as “playful and profound” and as a “duplicitous delight.”
Under the pseudonym Lars Arffsen, Douglas published The Girl with the Sturgeon Tattoo, a parody of the popular trilogy by Stig Larsson. Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin praised the book in a May 2011 round-up of summer beach reads, calling it a "nifty parody."
Works The Criminal State: War, Atrocity and the Dream of International Justice. Princeton University Press. 2026
Editor The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice (ed. with Jens Meierhenrich and Alexander Hinton, OUP 2025) Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2022). Law and Illiberalism. University of Massachusetts Press. Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2011). Law without Nations. Stanford University Press. Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2007). Law and Catastrophe. Stanford University Press. Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha, eds. (2005). The Limits of Law.'' Stanford University Press.
Novels
References
External links Judging the Courts: Wikinews interviews Prof. Lawrence Douglas. Faculty site at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas in "The Accountant of Auschwitz." Lawrence Douglas's Op-Eds in The Guardian.