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Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …

Law And Human Suffering: A Slice Of Life In Vichy France, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

This essay discusses three diaries from the Vichy era, the period of the Nazi Occupation of France: Jean Guéhenno’s Journal des années noires 1940-1944, Hélène Berr’s Journal, and Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar’s Ceux qui ne dormaient pas. Guéhenno was an educator and writer who entered the Resistance in 1940. His diary offers deep moral reflection as well as accounts of the dishonorable peace Vichy imposed and the ignoble servitude to which the new collaborationist French State and the Nazi occupier subjected France. In the final pages, as Leclerc’s army marches into Paris, with a victory he understands to be …

Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen

Articles

William Blackstone is often identified as a natural law thinker for whom property rights were preeminent, but reading the Commentaries complicates that description. I propose that Blackstone’s concept of law is more concerned with human invention and artifice than with human nature. At the start of his treatise, Blackstone identifies security, liberty and property as “absolute” rights that form the foundation of English law. But while security and liberty are “inherent by nature in every individual” and “strictly natural,” Blackstone is only willing to say that “private property is probably founded in nature.” Moreover, Blackstone is clear that there is …

Politicizing The Crime Against Humanity: The French Example, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The advantages of world adherence to universally acceptable standards of law and fundamental rights seemed apparent after the Second World War, as they had after the First. Their appeal seems ever greater and their advocates ever more persuasive today. The history of law provides evidence that caution may be in order, however, and that the human propensity to ignore what transpires under the surface of law threatens to dull and silence the ongoing self-examination and self-criticism required in perpetuity by the law if it is to be correlated with justice.

This Essay presents one side, the dark side, of the …

Competing Frameworks For Assessing Contemporary Holocaust-Era Claims, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

There are many angles from which to perceive the contemporary holocaust-era claims. In 1997, Time magazine quoted Elie Wiesel as saying that, [i]f all the money in all the Swiss banks were turned over, it would not bring back the life of one Jewish child. But the money is a symbol. It is part of the story. If you suppress any part of the story, it comes back later, with force and violence.

Wiesel touches on two perspectives: first, what has been described as litigating the holocaust, with all that that implies about the law's questionable capacity to adjudicate issues …