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* Goethe University Frankfurt [
]. I would like to thank Michelle Farrell for her helpful comments.
'What is politics?'1 is an omnipresent question in Hannah Arendt's work and one which is broadly explored in countless publications. 'What is law?', in contrast, is a question which has not been of much interest within Arendt scholarship to date.2 There is a good reason for this: in none of her writings are questions about the 'essence of law'3 explicitly addressed. Her engagement with law seems not to be systematic but rather episodic and sporadic. However, on the basis of three different discourses - historical, political-theoretical, and legal-philosophical - I shall point out that Arendt's dealing with legal questions takes place on a continuous basis and should be regarded as crucial for a proper understanding of her thoughts. What I try to elucidate in the following is that Arendt's thoughts are concerned with an adequate arrangement of law, politics, and order - the triad of constitutionalism.
Her considerations on Eichmann and the aporias of human rights in Origins of Totalitarianism are very well-known passages in her work in which her addressing of legal questions is apparent. Nevertheless, by discussing these topics, the literature on Arendt stays within the scope of the specific question itself and does not relate Arendt's considerations to more general ones about the essence, meaning, and function of law as such. To give an example: the wording 'a right to have rights'4 has been analysed and discussed from a moral-philosophical point of view,5 and it has been questioned whether or not human rights do contain aporias,6 or expound the interrelationship between human rights and democratic popular sovereignty.7 The same is true for Arendt's book on Eichmann: Arendt's remarks on 'transformative justice'8 and on the category of crimes against humanity, her response to the legal principle of nulla poena sine lege , her ideal verdict at the end of the book, and her plea for an international criminal court are all themes which have been broadly discussed within Arendt scholarship. These legal-theoretical and legal-philosophical considerations have never, however, been related to questions about the status of law in her own thoughts.