Law After Auschwitz: Towards A Jurisprudence Of The Holocaust

The idea of Nazi law is, for many lawyers, an oxymoron. Today, law under the National Socialist regime continues to be portrayed and understood as the ultimate perversion of legality and the Holocaust as the inevitable result of the collapse of the rule of law. This book offers important insights into the ways in which our understanding of the Holocaust and of the law have been built upon mutually reinforcing but erroneous constructions of the two. Fraser argues that the Holocaust is best understood, or at least studied, not as a point of lawless, criminal disjuncture with law, but as offering remarkable points of commonality and continuity with the law, with legality as understood at the time, and with law as we understand and practice it today.

Law After Auschwitz studies law and lawyers under Nazi rule, the jurisprudence of Nazi law, and the reception of Nazi law by contemporary legal scholarship. It offers detailed analyses of the ways in which the Holocaust has been constructed in post-war trials. This book raises fundamental questions about legality and ethics in the 21st century. If the Holocaust took place in a "legal" framework, and if the legal system today operates in part in a continuous fashion with Nazi legality, then law must be understood as still operating in the shadow of Auschwitz. Throughout the book, the consequences of a legal system which operates in a state of willful amnesia about its own implication in the Shoah, is the central focus.