As noted in the Introduction to this volume, the primary goal of this book was to assess the legacy and contributions of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) to international criminal law and practice. We saw that “legacy”, as used in this volume, was defined as a specific reference to the legal rules, principles, practices and norms that the SCSL is expected to leave behind for current and future generations of international, internationalized and national courts charged with the responsibility to prosecute the same or similar international crimes. On one level, much like Justice Robert Jackson argued in relation to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT) in 1946, as discussed in the Introduction to this volume, it can be argued that it is too early to appreciate the full impact and legacy of the SCSL and its contributions to international criminal law and practice. History proved Justice Jackson right. And although he had presciently observed that it was possible that the Nuremberg trials would become the biggest moral and legal advance from World War II, humanity only felt the full reverberations of the IMT’s legacy several decades later. In fact, it took until the early 1990s for the Nuremberg Legacy to be realized after the United Nations invoked the post–World War II trials to create the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the subsequent international criminal courts that followed in its wake, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the SCSL.
