"This is Not Like Any Other Legal Question": A Brief History of Nazi Law Before U.K. and U.S. Courts
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
International Law
Abstract
This year marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the Hart-Fuller debate regarding legal positivism and natural law, which first appeared in the pages of the Harvard Law Review.' In this article I attempt to add to the mix and complexity of these jurisprudential debates by exploring the issue at the core of the Hart-Fuller discourse about law by placing it in the concrete context of decided case law. I will explore the current jurisprudential implications of our historically and discursively constructed images of "Nazi law." In what follows, I offer an examination of most of the cases which have compelled British and American courts to confront "Nazi law." In these decisions, common law jurisdictions were forced to apply the categories of recognizable causes of action and the principles of private international law to instances involving direct appeals to the laws operating under the Nazi regime. By taking the Hart-Fuller debate out of the sterile atmosphere of esoteric academic debate and placing the issues into the world of "real law," I hope to illustrate some of the ways in which "Nazi law" has raised questions about what judges and lawyers actually do and what they should do.
Recommended Citation
Fraser, David, ""This is Not Like Any Other Legal Question": A Brief History of Nazi Law Before U.K. and U.S. Courts" (2003). Connecticut Journal of International Law. 406.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/cjil/406
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