Opinion ID: 199478
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The International Law Defense.

Text: 38 Maxwell's final plaint concerns the district court's rejection of his international law defense. This affirmative defense hinges on Maxwell's claim that the deployment of Trident submarines is a war crime, giving him the privilege of breaking domestic law to stop it. When asked to identify the source of this privilege, he points to decisions by the international tribunal that presided over the trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg after World War II. 39 The district court held that the decisions of the Nuremberg tribunal did not shield Maxwell from the consequences of his acts. See Maxwell-Anthony, 129 F. Supp. 2d at 106-07. This is a legal conclusion, and we review it de novo. Campos-Orrego v. Rivera, 175 F.3d 89, 96 (1st Cir. 1999). 40 Maxwell is not the first to attempt to import the Nuremberg defense into our criminal law. Confronted with such an attempt, the Eighth Circuit explained that the Nuremberg defendants undertook acts that were required by domestic law but violated international law. Kabat, 797 F.2d at 590. The Nuremberg tribunal held that the defendants could not escape responsibility for these acts by pointing to their domestic law obligations; they had a privilege under international law to violate domestic law in order to prevent the ongoing crimes against humanity that their country was perpetrating through them. Id. We echo this explanation. 41 Because Maxwell was under no compulsion to violate international law, his attempt to cloak himself in the Nuremberg mantle fails. Under his formulation, an individual gains the privilege to violate domestic law simply by being a citizen of a nation that possesses nuclear weapons. This is a quantum leap beyond the frontier of the classic Nuremberg defense -- and one that we refuse to undertake. 42 In our view, an individual cannot assert a privilege to disregard domestic law in order to escape liability under international law unless domestic law forces that person to violate international law. See id.; see also Montgomery, 772 F.2d at 737-38; United States v. Brodhead, 714 F. Supp. 593, 597-98 (D. Mass. 1989); cf. United States v. Allen, 760 F.2d 447, 453 (2d Cir. 1985) (rejecting international law defense on standing grounds); May, 622 F.2d at 1009-10 (similar). Maxwell does not argue that he was put in such a position by the government, nor could he. For this reason, the district court properly rejected his international law defense. 43 This holding also disposes of Maxwell's lament anent the lower court's exclusion of the expert testimony that he proffered on the illegality of nuclear weapons under international law. Since the Nuremberg defense is unavailable to him, the status of nuclear weapons under international law is irrelevant in his case. The district court's evidentiary ruling was, therefore, unimpugnable.