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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Complicity In The Perversion Of Justice: The Role Of Lawyers In Eroding The Rule Of Law In The Third Reich, Cynthia Fountaine Jul 2020

Complicity In The Perversion Of Justice: The Role Of Lawyers In Eroding The Rule Of Law In The Third Reich, Cynthia Fountaine

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

A fundamental tenet of the legal profession is that lawyers and judges are uniquely responsible—individually and collectively—for protecting the Rule of Law. This Article considers the failings of the legal profession in living up to that responsibility during Germany’s Third Reich. The incremental steps used by the Nazis to gain control of the German legal system—beginning as early as 1920 when the Nazi Party adopted a party platform that included a plan for a new legal system—turned the legal system on its head and destroyed the Rule of Law. By failing to uphold the integrity and independence of the profession, …


Judicializing History: Mass Crimes Trials And The Historian As Expert Witness In West Germany, Cambodia, And Bangladesh, Rebecca Gidley, Mathew Turner Dec 2018

Judicializing History: Mass Crimes Trials And The Historian As Expert Witness In West Germany, Cambodia, And Bangladesh, Rebecca Gidley, Mathew Turner

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Henry Rousso warned that the engagement of historians as expert witnesses in trials, particularly highly politicized proceedings of mass crimes, risks a judicialization of history. This article tests Rousso’s argument through analysis of three quite different case studies: the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial; the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia; and the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh. It argues that Rousso’s objections misrepresent the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, while failing to account for the engagement of historical expertise in mass atrocity trials beyond Europe. Paradoxically, Rousso’s criticisms are less suited to the European context that represents his purview, and apply more …


A European Peace Order And The German Question: Legal And Political Aspects, Jost Delbrueck Jan 1990

A European Peace Order And The German Question: Legal And Political Aspects, Jost Delbrueck

Michigan Journal of International Law

The post-World War II political setting in Europe was marked by the stable posture of two tightly structured opposing bloc-systems. In military terms, the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and in the economic sphere, the Eastern European Council for Mutual Economic Cooperation and the Western European Economic Communities, represented the stark distinctions of the Cold War. This stable posture has definitely come to an end. Due to the rapid decline of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, there is a growing concern in various political quarters about an emerging political instability in Eastern and Central Europe brought …


Specific Performance In France And Germany, John P. Dawson Feb 1959

Specific Performance In France And Germany, John P. Dawson

Michigan Law Review

Edgar Durfee studied long and closely the subject of specific performance. He taught it for many years, wrote about it and planned to ·write more. He conceived it broadly, as he did every subject that ever had his attention, but he had a lively interest in details, including very technical details. Long before others and much more than most, he saw the importance of our remedial system both in shaping law and as a reflection of its larger purposes. All those who learned from him will remember as long as memory lasts the insight he gave and the hidden meanings …


Legal Techniques And Political Ideologies: A Comparative Study, Alexander H. Pekelis Feb 1943

Legal Techniques And Political Ideologies: A Comparative Study, Alexander H. Pekelis

Michigan Law Review

The problem with which we are going to deal is one of comparative law, a discipline probably even more illusory than legal science itself. A body of laws represents in itself neither a social reality nor a social ideal. One of the difficulties that every historian faces in trying to reconstruct a period of the past with the help of legal monuments is due to the great variety of relations existing between legal rules and social reality. So, e.g., legal monuments generally contain in an inextricable confusion at least two contradictory types of rules: rules which are a simple restatement …