American Memories: Atrocities and the Law. By Joachim J. Savelsberg and Ryan D. King. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011. 264 pp. $37.50 cloth.

• Date: 01 September 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12101
• Published date: 01 September 2014

Posner, Hon. Richard A. (2004) Catastrophe: Risk and Response. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

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Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

——— (2006) Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform. New

York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

——— (2007) Countering Terrorism: Blurred Focus, Halting Steps. New York: Rowman and

Littlefield Publishers.

——— (2008) How Judges Think. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

——— (2009) A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ‘08 and the Descent into Depression.

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∗∗∗

American Memories: Atrocities and the Law. By Joachim J. Savelsberg

and Ryan D. King. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011. 264

pp. $37.50 cloth.

Reviewed by Ron Levi, Department of Sociology, University of

Toronto

Maurice Halbwachs survived for 8 months in the Buchenwald con-

centration camp. He died of dysentery in Block 56 of Buchenwald’s

kleines lager, or “Little Camp,” in 1945 (Semprum 1994: 27). Sepa-

rated by barbed wire even from the remainder of Buchenwald, the

most extreme conditions of starvation, disease, forced labor, torture

and medical experimentation were visited upon inmates. The

Buchenwald crematorium, throughout this time, was visibly located

above inmates held in the kleines lager.

“Does the world know what happened to us?” survivors of

Buchenwald are recalled asking repeatedly, on the day in which

U.S. troops entered the camp in April 1945 (Fox 2013). How all the

more unspeakable, then, that among the dead of Buchenwald was

Maurice Halbwachs, the French sociologist whose signal contribu-

tion was giving life to the concept of collective memory, and the

social process of witnessing, remembering, and commemorating

the past (Halbwachs 1950).

In American Memories: Atrocities and the Law, Savelsberg and King

build on Halbwachs’ thinking to examine the role that legal insti-

tutions can play in forging collective memories of atrocities. In the

process, Savelsberg and King develop an inventive and rigorous

sociology of law and of politics in the process. They argue that

collective memory is strengthened in those cases when legal

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