Stolleis on Law and Lawyers Preparing the Holocaust

Law and Lawyers Preparing the Holocaust by Michael Stolleis appears in the December 2007 issue of the Annual Review of Law & Social Science. Stolleis is currently Interim Director of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History and is the author of A History of Public Law in Germany, 1941-1945, The Law under the Swastika: Studies on Legal History in Nazi Germany, and other works of German legal history. He has posted a short abstract on SSRN:

After an introduction into the paradoxes of the coexistence of a traditional legal order, oppression, and persecution of opponents and minorities under the National Socialist government in Germany (1933-1945), the article explains how deep the National Socialist ideology penetrated several fields (constitutional and administrative law, penal law, tax law, etc.). I conclude with a short reflection concerning the problem of historicizing Nazi law.