The retroactive criminalisation at Nuremberg absolutely was controversial at the time. It only got pushed through because of US instance. It is literally an example of might making right.

Seems like an extreme counter example. In the spirit of the parent post I guess you could argue theft, murder etc. was already illegal?

Also, it is morally different when you want to punish lawmakers.

> Seems like an extreme counter example.

It is voluntarily ridiculously extreme, because the parent comment was itself ridiculously categorical.

The thing is: most of the time, retro-active laws are dangerous tools that should be used rarely and with caution, but sometimes and when some people have been doing something that they knew was evil even though not technically illegal, it can make sense to punish them with laws designed after the fact.

Sure fair enough. That is the problem with many rules of thumb, where people interpret "all" and "always" to mean all and always.

Especially evident in programming. E.g. "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

That’s one line everyone remembers snipped from somewhat more nuanced context.

Knuth said: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

Oh ... ye well Knuth makes my point. :)