Rob and Bert in Tokyo

This essay is steeped in contradiction: it is as much an attempt at mourning, coping, and letting go as it is an exercise in remembrance, rediscovery, and reconnection. One of the many areas of international legal scholarship where Rob Cryer left his mark is his oeuvre on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). To pay tribute to, and get re-acquainted with, Rob-the-person, I re-read his 2010 article on the ‘dignified dissenter’ in Tokyo, Dutch Judge Bert Röling. In that article, Rob uses the memoranda and the opinion of Bert-the-judge to assess his conceptual and legal contributions to the IMTFE judgment. They also serve him as a vehicle to get a better grasp of the author behind the text and the values and dilemmas that shaped Röling’s positions on the IMTFE bench. What more can we learn and understand about Rob Cryer while ‘reading Rob reading Bert’? What aspects of Röling’s legacy did he choose to foreground, and what qualities did he appreciate most? How did Rob treat his character when shedding light on the more contentious elements of Röling’s work? Even if this essay fails in its therapeutic purpose, it might still add a few mosaic pieces to the collective construction of Rob’s portrait in this volume.