Abstract
The Nuremberg Code is an excerpt from the criminal judgment of 1947 in the "doctors' trial," which contains a list of ten criteria used by the Court in assessing the licit or illicit nature of human experimentation alleged against the accused. This list became autonomized as a body of ethical precepts and moral maxims under the name Nuremberg Code. In France, the appropriation of the Nuremberg Code by ethicists in the early eighties was built amid ignorance of the initial legal nature of this text.We recall, first, the primary function (and content) of the Nuremberg Code: recap the customary criteria of the lawfulness of experimentation on human beings, by reference to which a criminal conviction for illicit experiments becomes legally conceivable (I). We show, secondly, that in addition to this primary function, the Code and the whole judgment of Nuremberg built a remarkably durable edifice: an international judicial solution to the debate on the universalism of medical ethics (II).