1. Office Space: Mark Drumbl

Mark Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and director of Washington and Lee University School of Law's Transnational Law Institute, as well as editor-in-chief of the International Criminal Law Review. Before entering academia, he clerked for Justice Frank Iacobucci at the Supreme Court of Canada, worked at law firms in Toronto and New York and then went on to serve as defense counsel in Rwandan domestic genocide trials - an experience that would shape his scholarly life. His research spans international criminal law, post-conflict reconstruction, child soldiers and transitional justice. His work has been cited by national and international courts, relied upon by the United Nations and reviewed in virtually every major international law journal. His first book, "Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law" (Cambridge University Press, 2007), won the International Association of Criminal Law's Book of the Year Award. His second book, "Reimagining Child Soldiers" (Oxford University Press, 2012), unpacks why and how children end up in armed forces and armed groups. His third book, "Informers Up Close" (Oxford University Press, 2024), co-authored with Barbora Holá, probes why ordinary people become informers under repressive regimes - and what societies owe to the truth afterward. He has taught at law schools on almost every continent.

Learn more about the discoveries he's made during his long career as he shares the stories behind the objects in his office.

In 2020, we [Drumbl's spouse, Michelle Drumbl, who serves as associate dean for academic affairs, Robert O. Bentley Professor of Law and director of the tax clinic at W&L Law School] did a sabbatical in Northern Ireland at Queen's University Belfast. Our two sons, aged 13 and 11 at the time, attended school there. While there, we had a chance to visit a large number of IRA (Irish Republican Army) museums and also Loyalist museums. There's a real iconography of the figure of the youth as both a victim as well as perpetrator in the Troubles, the internecine violence in Northern Ireland that lasted until the mid-'90s, which was largely resolved by the Good Friday Agreements - brokered in part by the United States.

Belfast is actually one of the most interesting cities that I've ever had a chance to live in. It's so brutalist in the architecture, but it also has this incredible sensitivity and beauty to it. We really liked it there. I've maintained an ongoing relationship with Queen's University Belfast. In fact, I'm about to publish a co-edited book called "Reframing Transitional Justice." We had a little launch for it in Belfast in the summer of 2025. The book cover is an image from a political mural in Belfast commemorating hunger striker Bobby Sands. And I'm going back in April because I was invited to give this year's British Academy lecture. It's called the Maccabean Lecture in Jurisprudence, and indeed it will be delivered at Queen's University Belfast. The topic will be on child soldiers. This is a topic close to my heart. In April 2023, I co-organized an international conference at W&L on children and violence.

There are a couple of other things here from Northern Ireland as well. I bought this postcard in the Ulster Museum. It's a card to commemorate a picture of a parade that happens on July 12, known as Orangemen's Day. This celebrates the 1690 Battle of the Boyne victory of Protestant King William of Orange over Catholic King James II. Orangemen undertake public parades, notably in Belfast and Derry, and, in the past, it's led to terrible violence. Things are calmer now but remain edgy. Provocations lurk in seams and cracks, along with hopes of a serene and convivial future.

This instrument doesn't work, but it's from Rwanda. Before I joined the faculty here, I was a defense lawyer in Rwanda in the national criminal trials following the 1994 genocide. I represented about 250 clients - people who were accused of genocide. And, as a result of my experiences there, I became extremely interested in international criminal law. I developed some skepticism of the role of law in transitioning societies beyond massive human rights abuses. More is needed, and different things are required. I still think we should have trials to deontologically denounce individuals who have committed genocide, sure, but to elevate criminal trials as the be-all and end-all of political transition I find places far too much value on something that actually delivers fairly limited dividends.

This mask is from the Amazon. I spent two summers teaching international environmental law at the Federal University of the Amazonas in Manaus with Professor Jim Kahn in economics. Manaus is a city in the middle of Brazil. There's no road access to Manaus - it's the largest city in the world to which the only access is by water (on the Amazon) or by air. It's at the confluence of the two major tributaries that join to form the breadth of the Amazon.

I wrote a book called "Informers Up Close: Stories From Communist Prague" about the role of informers in Communist Czechoslovakia, which explored, in particular, the motivations as to why people informed on others. I wrote it with a Czech law professor who teaches in the Netherlands, Barbora Holá. She was a scholar-in-residence here at W&L for half a year. She did all the archival research in the state security police files in Prague, and then we wrote this book together. It was published in 2024. We identified four major emotions that drive people to become informers in authoritarian regimes: desire, resentment, devotion and fear. We also talk about what kind of transitional justice mechanisms should be put in place to address the harms informers inflict on others, while recognizing that many informers themselves are victims, and, accordingly, we encourage a reconciliatory approach.

I have spent a fair bit of time in the Czech Republic, starting back in 2015 when I first taught at Masaryk University in Brno, the second-largest city in the country. The Czech Republic is a beguiling place that has been transformative for me in many ways. Prague is such a gem of a place. The top item in the photo is a poster of the Hotel International in Prague, which is now owned and run by Holiday Inn. In the communist years, it was built on the model of Stalinist architecture, what Joseph Stalin called the "Seven Sisters" buildings. The Hotel International, back then, was the main hotel for diplomats and high-level foreigners who visited the city. It was teeming with informers. After the fall of communism, it was taken over by the Holiday Inn corporation. The communist star on top was retained. It used to be red, and then Holiday Inn painted it green, because that's their color. The middle image is original artwork from Prague. It elegantly recounts the multiple dimensions in which people live by choice or by obligation, much like informers, which is a theme we explored in some of the symposia and events that popped up about and around our book. The third image is random. It's from vacation at Cannon Beach, Oregon.

We often forget that the Winter Olympics were in Sarajevo in Bosnia. This was a time when the former Yugoslavia was calm and settled. It was looked at as the most progressive of the communist states. I found this in a market there. It commemorates the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984. Seven years later, the place was in total bloodshed. It's amazing - the powder keg of hate and how quickly it can metastasize. This is something societies need to pay a lot of attention to.

Before the pandemic, in 2018, I visited Japan. And while there, I started a project that looked at the place and the role of memorialization when it comes to atrocity trials. After World War II, there was an international tribunal set up by Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan to prosecute 28 Japanese leaders - the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Defendants were convicted for the crime of aggression and crimes against humanity during World War II. One of the judges on that tribunal - the Indian judge, Judge Pal - totally dissented. He would have acquitted all of the Japanese defendants - not because they didn't do anything wrong, but because, in his view, what they did wasn't illegal at the time, because all they were doing was following Western historical approaches of colonialism and conquest, and it's not fair to create international law on the backs of the Japanese. He authored a very famous dissent in Tokyo. There is a special honorific memorial that is set up to commemorate him. I went to visit it. I wrote about it more in OpinioJuris. For now, in a nutshell, this is one of the few monuments in the world dedicated to an international judge. The great irony is that it's dedicated to a judge who acquitted all of the war criminals. So very political.

Seeing the site dedicated to Judge Pal, I thought: "This is wild." There's this whole space dedicated to honor an international judge who would have acquitted people accused of some of the most serious crimes. Pal is now heralded as a major voice of decolonial theory, speaking up for the dispossessed peoples seeking to throw off the shackles of colonialism.

Last year, I got an invitation from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences in Calcutta, India. They were hosting a big international conference to honor Judge Pal and asked me to give the keynote. So, I went to Calcutta with my older son, Paul, to give the keynote address. I ended up publishing a chapter in the book that a member of their faculty is editing.

The Bengals are very much into giving gifts, which is where I got this bridge, as well as a couple of other things I have in my office. That bridge is across the Hooghly, the river that goes through Calcutta, one of the offshoots of the Ganges. Judge Pal's grandson and his family were at the conference. Like the bridge spanning the wide river, generations bridge the past with the present. In my experience, the big and brassy world can also be so small and personal. This, too, is a theme that fascinates me. The power of the one person and the fortitude of individual agency.

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