Books in Brief: Courts of Terror

Courts of Terror: Soviet Criminal Justice and Jewish Emigration, by Telford Taylor (Knopf, 187 pp., $6.95).

Telford Taylor, former Nuremberg prosecutor and master of ex post facto justice, has dictated a silly little book. I say dictated because at one point he reports that he organized and dictated his notes—presumably to show us how important he is. However important he may be, this book is not. Mr. Taylor, who is a professor of law at Columbia, tells how, in the course of attempting to aid some Soviet Jews who were being persecuted for trying to emigrate to Israel, he and a few other lawyers (I quote from the jacket blurb) “challenged the Soviet judicial system on its own legal grounds” and discovered its true quality. Taylor found, he dictates, a “prostitution of Soviet justice to serve State ends.” He claims not to be surprised, but then why bother with this book? I can’t think of a good reason—certainly not one for reading it. The implication that there is a system of “Soviet justice” at all is offensive. The term should stick in the dictation belt. Perhaps there are minor rules and regulations, similar infractions of which are punished in similar ways. But justice there is not, as several generations of slaughter, Siberia, and insane asyla would teach anyone who could hear their testimony over the din of his dictating machine.

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Daniel Oliver

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Courts of Terror: Soviet Criminal Justice and Jewish Emigration, by Telford Taylor (Knopf, 187 pp., $6.95).

Telford Taylor, former Nuremberg prosecutor and master of ex post facto justice, has dictated a silly little book. I say dictated because at one point he reports that he organized and dictated his notes—presumably to show us how important he is. However important he may be, this book is not. Mr. Taylor, who is a professor of law at Columbia, tells how, in the course of attempting to aid some Soviet Jews who were being persecuted for trying to emigrate to Israel, he and a few other lawyers (I quote from the jacket blurb) “challenged the Soviet judicial system on its own legal grounds” and discovered its true quality. Taylor found, he dictates, a “prostitution of Soviet justice to serve State ends.” He claims not to be surprised, but then why bother with this book? I can’t think of a good reason—certainly not one for reading it. The implication that there is a system of “Soviet justice” at all is offensive. The term should stick in the dictation belt. Perhaps there are minor rules and regulations, similar infractions of which are punished in similar ways. But justice there is not, as several generations of slaughter, Siberia, and insane asyla would teach anyone who could hear their testimony over the din of his dictating machine.