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The Tokyo Dissent by Rakshit Sharma, published by Law & Justice Publishing Co., is the story of Justice Radha Binod Pal — the Indian judge on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East who refused to join the verdict of his ten colleagues and wrote a dissent that is still argued over eighty years later. With a special chapter by Ravi K. Iyer, "Shades of Justice", and a Foreword by Adv. Ikrant Sharma. Edition 2026.

When the Tokyo Tribunal delivered its judgment in November 1948, every accused was convicted. One judge dissented in full. Justice Pal's opinion ran to well over a thousand pages and acquitted all of the accused on all charges — not because he thought no atrocities had occurred, but because he held that the law the Tribunal was applying had been written after the events it punished, that aggressive war was not a crime for which individuals could be tried under the international law then in force, and that a court constituted solely by the victors could not deliver justice over the vanquished. It remains the most far-reaching judicial challenge ever made to the legitimacy of an international war crimes tribunal.

Pal was not a marginal figure. He had been a judge of the Calcutta High Court and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta before Tokyo, and afterwards he served on the United Nations International Law Commission, which he chaired. In Japan his name is remembered with a reverence that has no Indian parallel: there are memorials to him, and in 1966 he was conferred the Order of the Sacred Treasure. In India, outside a narrow circle of international lawyers, he is barely known at all. This book is written against that gap.

Key Features

• The life and the dissent of Justice Radha Binod Pal, the Indian judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, in a single accessible volume.
• A special chapter by Ravi K. Iyer, "Shades of Justice".
• Foreword by Adv. Ikrant Sharma.
• Written for the general reader as much as the lawyer — the legal argument is explained rather than assumed.
• Covers the reception of Pal in Japan, where he is honoured, and the comparative silence about him in India.
• Edition 2026, from Law & Justice Publishing Co.

Coverage

• Who Radha Binod Pal was: his early life, his mathematical and legal training, his years at the Calcutta High Court and as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta.
• How the Tokyo Tribunal came to be: the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, its Charter, its eleven judges and the states they represented, and its relationship to Nuremberg.
• The charges: crimes against peace, conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the novel category of the "Class A" defendant.
• The core of the dissent — legality: Pal's argument that the Tribunal was applying ex post facto law, and that individual criminal responsibility for waging aggressive war had no foundation in the international law in force at the material time.
• The core of the dissent — legitimacy: his objection to a court composed only of the victorious powers sitting in judgment on the defeated, and what he said that did to the appearance of justice.
• Colonialism and the dissent: Pal's refusal to treat European and American conduct in Asia as beyond the Tribunal's moral frame, and the uncomfortable questions that raised for the prosecuting powers.
• What Pal did not say: the atrocities he accepted as proved, and why acquittal on the charges framed did not amount to denial of the facts.
• The other separate opinions, and where Pal stood in relation to them.
• Pal after Tokyo: the United Nations International Law Commission, his chairmanship, and his later writing.
• Pal in Japan: the memorials, the Order of the Sacred Treasure, and the ways in which his dissent has been invoked — and sometimes appropriated — in Japanese political argument.
• The afterlife of the dissent in the law of international criminal tribunals, from the ad hoc tribunals to the International Criminal Court, and in the continuing debate about victors' justice.
• "Shades of Justice" — the special chapter contributed by Ravi K. Iyer.

Who Should Buy This Book?

• Students and teachers of international law, particularly international criminal law and the law of armed conflict.
• LL.B. and LL.M. students taking Public International Law, Human Rights or Jurisprudence, where the Tokyo and Nuremberg trials are foundational material.
• Advocates and judges with an interest in legal history and in the jurisprudence of dissent.
• Readers of history — of the Second World War in Asia, of decolonisation, and of India's place in the post-war legal order.
• Civil services and competitive examination aspirants for whom modern history and international institutions are examinable.
• Anyone interested in India-Japan relations, where Pal remains a recurring name.
• General readers who want a serious but readable account of a remarkable Indian judge.
• Law college, university and public libraries.

Why Choose This Book?

Most of what has been written about the Pal dissent is either a few paragraphs in an international law textbook or a specialist monograph priced for a university library. There is very little in between, and almost nothing published in India that treats Pal as a subject worth a whole book. That is the space this volume occupies: long enough to do the argument justice, short enough and plain enough to be read by someone who is not an international lawyer.

It is also a book about dissent itself. Pal was one judge against ten, writing an opinion he knew would change no verdict, on a bench where his view could not prevail. He wrote it anyway, at length, and it outlasted the judgment it opposed — which is the strongest argument there is for why a judge in the minority should write. For a reader who has encountered the Tokyo Tribunal only as a footnote to Nuremberg, this is a genuinely surprising story, and one that belongs to Indian legal history as much as to international law.