Content area
Full Text
Justifying Injustice: Legal Theory in Nazi Germany By Herlinde Pauer-Studer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 269. Cloth $110.00. ISBN 978-1107159303.
“With their seemingly innocent call for the unification of morality and law, NS jurists supported a major normative transgression: the state's deliberate demand upon its subjects’ ethical self-obligation. NS legal theory required an individual not only to comply with legal norms, but to abide by the state's orders and legal rules out of inner ethical commitment” (213). This is the central finding of Herlinde Pauer-Studer's recent book, which is nothing less than a discourse history of the National Socialist conception and interpretation of the law.
The book sheds light on the sometimes bitter debates between contemporary legal theorists on the nature and legitimacy of the National Socialist regime and on the transformation of law and justice into its compliant instrument—debates that have received little attention in research to date. In doing so, the book's focus on the ethicization of law constructed by Nazi legal scholars, which in effect enabled state access to the most intimate private spheres, promises a new perspective on an old topic. The study is divided into eight chapters and builds on a publication of original documents and texts edited by Pauer-Studer and Julian Fink in 2014 (Rechtfertigungen des Unrechts. Das Rechtsdenken im Nationalsozialismus in Originaltexten).
After an introductory crash course on the basics of Nazi law and its theoretical masterminds, such as the founder and president of the Academy of German Law Hans Frank, the constitutional lawyer Ernst Rudolf Huber, and the legal philosopher Karl Larenz, Pauer-Studer proceeds chronologically. In chapter 2, she examines the transformation of legal concepts and interpretation in the Weimar Republic away from...