But then he argues that once the legal form of having trials
for crimes against humanity was created, it could be appropriated by other
normative communities and used against the powerful.36 Thus, he describes
Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre’s trial of the Vietnam War as an attempt
to appropriate the Nuremberg form.37 Moreover, Cover acknowledges the
impact of legal enunciations, whether state-based or not, on legal
consciousness. He therefore defends the Nuremberg trials based on “the
capacity of the event to project a new legal meaning into the future.”38 Such
legal meaning was then available for others to use and build upon in
subsequent iterations.