Dudziak on Hitler's American Model and Transnational Legal History @marydudziak

Mary L. Dudziak, Emory University School of Law, has published The Outcome of Influence: Hitler’s American Model and Transnational Legal History at 117 Michigan Law Review 1179 (2019). Here is the abstract.

James Q. Whitman’s powerful book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Race Law, offers a chilling example of the way the United States can negatively influence the world. This review essay sets the book within the context of foreign relations history and transnational legal history. I first trace Whitman’s careful examination of Nazi uses of American law. His evidence of direct and substantial Nazi discussion of U.S. law when writing the Nuremburg Laws makes his core claim indisputable that American law was a model for the Nazis. Whitman shows that Nazi law sometimes did not go as far as American law due to foreign relations concerns. I argue that attention to Nazi foreign policy history would deepen this history, helping to explain how and when foreign criticism led Germany to modify its approach to race law. Hitler’s ultimate goal was the expansion of German power, not the maintenance of a positive German image, so any moderation in the Nuremberg Laws due to foreign criticism was likely tied to specific goals, like the importance of particular trade relations to Hitler’s goal to expand Germany. Finally, the essay sets Hitler’s American Model within the broader history of the international impact of domestic law. The foreign relations impact of U.S. race discrimination provides an illuminating comparison because foreign criticism played a different role than the German experience. Negative international reaction to American racism during the early Cold War years led American leaders to believe that civil rights reform was essential to protecting the U.S. global image, which mattered to maintaining American Cold War leadership. In comparison, Nazi concerns may have been tied to efforts to build up their arms industry as a means of enabling German power. Comparing the two examples can illuminate the varied relationships between domestic law and international affairs. The international role of domestic law is not limited to the borrowing of legal texts, and the transnational promotion of legal norms. Domestic law can also be an aspect of a nation’s diplomacy. The essay suggests questions for future scholars to pursue, and includes in the footnotes concrete ideas and resources for researching the transnational history of domestic law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Jens Meierhenrich on the Remnants of the Rechtstaat (OUP, 2018) @OUPAcademic

New from Oxford University Press: Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics and Political Science, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat (2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book is an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's The Dual State (1941, reissued 2017), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel's was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of Nazism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany. His sophisticated-not to mention courageous-analysis amounted to an ethnography of Nazi law. As a result of its clandestine origins, The Dual State has been hailed as the ultimate piece of intellectual resistance to the Nazi regime. In this book, Jens Meierhenrich revives Fraenkel's innovative concept of "the dual state," restoring it to its rightful place in the annals of public law scholarship. Blending insights from legal theory and legal history, he tells in an accessible manner the remarkable gestation of Fraenkel's ethnography of law from inside the belly of the behemoth. In addition to questioning the conventional wisdom about the law of the Third Reich, Meierhenrich explores the legal origins of dictatorship elsewhere, then and now. The book sets the parameters for a theory of the "authoritarian rule of law," a cutting edge topic in law and society scholarship with immediate policy implications.

 

"Let's Hear It For Dear Leader!" On Tyrants Writing Poetry @ArsScripta @CEUPress

A new book from Central European University Press explores why dictators are so drawn to expressing themselves in verse, and what that attraction might reveal about their leadership style. Hmmm...love the art but hate the artist? Tyrants Writing Poetry (Konstantin Kaminskij and Albrecht Koschorke, eds., Central European University Press, eds., 2018).

As conventional understanding would have it, the sometimes brutal business of governing can only be carried out at the price of distance from art, while poetic beauty best flourishes at a distance from actions executed at the pole of power. Dramatically contradicting this idea is the fact that violent rulers are often the greatest friends of art, and indeed draw attention to themselves as artists. Why do tyrants of all people often have a particularly poetic vein? Where do terror and fiction meet? The cultural history of totalitarian regimes is unwrapped in ten case studies, in a comparative perspective. The book focuses on the phenomenon that many of the great despots in history were themselves writers. By studying the artistic ambitions of Nero, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Saparmurat Nyyazow and Radovan Karadzic, the studies explore the complicated relationship between poetry and political violence, and open our eyes for the aesthetic dimensions of total power. The essays make an important contribution to a number of fields: the study of totalitarian regimes, cultural studies, biographies of 20th century leaders. They underscore the frequent correlation between tyrannical governance and an excessive passion for language, and prove that the merging of artistic and political charisma tends to justify the claim to absolute power.

More about the book here.

A New Book Celebrates Comic Book Superheroes Who Battled Adolf Hitler

Mark Fertig's new book Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War (Fantagraphics Books, 2017) features over 500 covers of superhero comic books published between 1941 and 1945 showing those who took on Adolf Hitler. Those who defeated Hitler in print included Captain America, Wonder Woman, and others.