Nazi Law: From Nuremberg to Nuremberg ed. by John J. Michalczyk (review)

The adage tells us not to judge a book by its cover. In the case of the volume under review, this bit of common wisdom might be expanded to include a warning that we must not judge a book by its title. When one realizes that this collection of essays had its origins in a conference at Boston College entitled "Legally Blind: Law, Ethics, and the Third Reich," the technical limits of the title begin to open up to reveal both the strengths and one ultimate weakness of the work.

The particular strengths can be found in the depth and breadth of the topics discussed and analyzed under the rubric "Nazi law" with a strong focus on ethical issues. From the nature and role of medical science and the position of organized Christianity under Nazi rule, to the framework for Nazi plunder of Jewish property and current legal attempts to achieve some form of restitution for the victims of Nazi legalized theft, to an examination of the evolution of the German criminal law doctrine expanding the notion of functional liability that has enabled the more recent set of prosecutions of camp guards and lower-level bureaucrats whose work facilitated the killing apparatus, the work traces an overarching thematic of law and ethics in Nazi society and within the Nazi state apparatus. It attempts to highlight how the Hitler regime created a "judicial system without Jews and without justice," and how postwar "law" dealt with the "crimes" of the Nazi state. The contributors and the editor are to be applauded for the broad range of topics situated within their critique of "Nazi law." This includes important current issues of continuity and lessons unlearned from the Nuremberg Code on medical experiments and the prohibition on torture in the shadows of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

The overall strength and appeal of the essays as a project are easily identified. The contributions highlight and underline the complexity of the Nazi state apparatus and its interactions with a set of civil society organisms, interactions that made the concretization of important aspects of the Hitler project possible. A complex set of legal norms played a vital role in this amalgam of state and civil society, and many contributors highlight different ways in which the broad legal framework was put into practice in a variety of contexts, in the functioning of Germany after 1933. The collection demonstrates and highlights the ways in which a legal normative set of structures created by the Nazi state served as the basis upon which property identified as Jewish could be expropriated, those identified as enemies of the Volksgemeinschaft because they followed a different God could be persecuted, and finally how the Jews of Europe could be identified, excluded, and killed. Overall, the collection reinforces an understanding of the Nazi period as one characterized by often successful attempts to institute a new understanding of the state and of civil society as a more unitary set of ideological beliefs and organizational structures in which law played an overarching systemizing role. Examining the Nazi period under a broad thematic that places law as an important sociological element working together with other complex structural elements of Nazi society is a key contribution to scholarly study of Germany between 1933 and 1945.

But it is in its particular sociological and jurisprudential presentation of Nazi law that the volume and its contributors fall short of making a more vital sociolegal contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the Nazi regime. Perhaps because the focus is on the repression and killing of German and European Jews, or on targeting and persecuting religious groups, the contributors and the editor have missed a golden opportunity to offer the reader some detailed insight into what makes, as an important historical taxonomical qualification, Nazi law "Nazi." Instead, the volume falls into the easy and common jurisprudential confusion between "law" and "justice." Despite chapters dealing with natural law theory in Germany and...