Rate My Professor Paul Taucher

Paul Taucher is a Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, College of Law, Arts and Social Sciences at Murdoch University. He serves as Academic Chair for the History major in the Bachelor of Arts program. Taucher earned undergraduate degrees in Law and History, followed by an Honours degree from Murdoch University in 2016 with the thesis "Command responsibility at the Sandakan-Ranau war crimes trial." He completed his Doctor of Philosophy at Murdoch University in 2022, with the dissertation "Prosecuting command: Allied command responsibility trials of junior and mid-level Japanese officers after the Second World War." His academic career at Murdoch began in 2017 as a sessional tutor and has progressed to his current lecturing role. Taucher is a Fellow of the Indo-Pacific Research Centre and received the 2018 National Library of Australia Summer Scholarship for his research on Australian command responsibility trials of Japanese officers during World War II.

Taucher's research focuses on war crimes, command responsibility in international law, legal history, and the laws of war following the Second World War. His major publication is the monograph "Command on Trial: Japanese Officers, War Crimes, and Command Responsibility," published by Hong Kong University Press in 2026, which examines the unstable application of command responsibility in Allied prosecutions of over 5,700 suspected Japanese war criminals between 1945 and 1951, particularly highlighting inconsistencies in trials of lower-ranking officers. Key peer-reviewed works include "Escape from Justice: The Failed Prosecutions of Baron Takasaki Masamitsu" in War in History (2021). He has contributed chapters to volumes such as Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History and presented at symposia including the Prisoners of the Asia-Pacific War Symposium on POW responses in post-war trials. Taucher engages public discourse through co-authored articles in The Conversation on topics like Australian special forces war crimes allegations in Afghanistan and the Ben Roberts-Smith case. He has provided expert submissions to Australian parliamentary inquiries on defence honours and awards in relation to war crimes findings, influencing discussions on military accountability and international justice.