"To talk about law and collective memory is almost immediately to conjure images of the show trial where individual rights and truth were sacrificed in the service of political goals. Mark Osiel notes that acts asserting legal rights or officially stigmatizing their violation have often become a focal point for the collective memory of whole nations. These acts often become secular rites of commemoration. As such, they consolidate shared memories with increasing deliberateness and sophistication. These events are both “real” and “staged.” In this regard, they seem to problematize the very distinction between true and false representations of reality."