Law and the Holocaust (LAWS90076)

The proposed course examines the relationship between law and the origins and implementation of the events known as the Holocaust. Students will consider the questions for law-making, judging, legal theory, and legal scholarship arising from Hitler’s rise to power, the legalization of the Nazi racial-biological worldview through eugenics and anti-Jewish legislation, the character of parallel anti-Jewish legal programs in Vichy France and elsewhere, the challenge to our conceptions of legal and moral responsibility that is presented by the idea of ‘administrative massacre’, and the question of how the Nazi legal era has been represented in mainstream jurisprudence.

By studying the sequential moments of legal and institutional pathology that provided the context for the persecution of the Jews – loss of meaningful constitutionalism or constitutional values, loss of legal rights, loss of citizenship, loss of the standards of the rule of law, loss of the status of the legal subject as a bearer of dignity, amongst others – students will have the opportunity to think deeply about the significance of these pathologies for our understanding of what law is, what we think law should be, and what conditions are required for law to mediate power rather than merely provide a vehicle for its expression.

No specialized background in history is required in order to undertake this course: those areas of particular knowledge necessary to successfully complete the course are to be found in the reading materials and will be clarified in the seminars. Students are advised that although this is not a course in International Criminal Law, International Human Rights Law, or comparative genocide, the subject matter is complementary to study in these areas, as well as to study in legal and political theory.