michael bazyler

Professional Background

Professor Michael Bazyler received a J.D. from the University of Southern California Law School and a B.A. with Honors in political science and international relations from the University of California, Los Angeles. During his fellowship at the Museum, he was Professor of International Law at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, California. For his Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship, Professor Bazyler conducted research for his project “Trials of the Einsatzgruppen as a Model for Prosecuting Modern-Day Perpetrators of Genocide and Other Massive Human Rights Abuses.”

A specialist in human rights law, Professor Bazyler has published over fifty articles in the area of international law and international trade, including editorials in The Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, and the Jerusalem Post, among others. While at the University of Southern California he served as an editor of the Southern California Law Review. He is the author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York University Press, 2003) and contributing editor of Encyclopedia of Genocide, Israel Charny, executive editor (ABC-CLIO, 2000) which is the first reference work to fully document the crime of genocide. Professor Bazyler has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at Chapman University of Law; a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School; an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University; a research fellow at the Holocaust Educational Trust, in London; and a visiting professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, Brooklyn Law School, and the University of San Diego Law School. He has taught additional courses abroad in Israel, Russia, Poland, Belarus, and England.

Fellowship Research

During his tenure at the Museum, Professor Bazyler researched and drew parallels among the prosecution of Einsatzgruppen members at the Nuremberg trials and defendants in modern genocide or human rights abuse cases—those who sat before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the possible prosecution of those responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. He closely examined the Museum’s Ben Ferencz archival collection to complete his research.

Professor Bazyler was in residence at the Mandel Center from February 3 to June 24, 2003.