His films like 'Rocco and His Brothers' and 'The Leopard' examine the legal and social restructuring of post-war Italian society and the tension between old aristocratic systems and new democratic order.

His masterpiece 'Judgment at Nuremberg' directly confronts post-war legal accountability and the moral complexities of prosecuting Nazi war crimes in a reformed legal framework.

His films obsessively explore how post-war German legal systems and institutions failed to reckon with Nazi legacies, examining corruption and complicity in reformed bureaucracies.