Kostal, "Laying Down the Law The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan"

New from Harvard University Press: Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan, by R. W. Kostal (Western University, Ontario). A description from the Press:

A legal historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries.

Following victory in World War II, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan: to achieve their permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders with liberal rule-of-law regimes.

In his comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions.
Drawing on rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other. Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy weakened U.S. credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied Germany and Japan.

In Laying Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system, making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.

Advance praise:

“In 1945, Americans boldly set out to remake the legal systems of occupied Japan, where they knew nothing about Japanese law, and Germany, where they often ignored German experts. Kostal’s book is a wonderfully novel, clear, and caustic history of the successes and failures of these endeavors.”—Robert W. Gordon

“This much-needed and compelling book examines American legal reform in occupied Germany and Japan, emphasizing the centrality of individual rights and the rule of law to American conceptualizations of democratic transformation. Kostal’s close attention to the successes, hypocrisies, and shortcomings of these American efforts offers vital insights while highlighting the intellectual, institutional, and moral limits of American visions of postwar democratization.”—Jennifer M. Miller

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

The Limits of Law: Cases

We asked the 2018-19 Davis Fellows the following question: how has your time at the Davis Center led to new insights about the reach and limits of law and legalities? Here is one set of answers that relate to each scholar's area of study (our other posts in this series are here and here):

Xia on justice and nationalism in wartime China

Back in 2017, Yun Xia (Valparaiso University) published Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China with the University of Washington Press. From the publisher:

Throughout the War of Resistance against Japan (1931-1945), the Chinese Nationalist government punished collaborators with harsh measures, labeling the enemies from within hanjian (literally, "traitors to the Han Chinese"). Trials of hanjian gained momentum during the postwar years, escalating the power struggle between Nationalists and Communists. Yun Xia examines the leaders of collaborationist regimes, who were perceived as threats to national security and public order, and other subgroups of hanjian-including economic, cultural, female, and Taiwanese hanjian. Built on previously unexamined code, edicts, and government correspondence, as well as accusation letters, petitions, newspapers, and popular literature, Down with Traitors reveals how the hanjian were punished in both legal and extralegal ways and how the anti-hanjian campaigns captured the national crisis, political struggle, roaring nationalism, and social tension of China's eventful decades from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Praise for the book:

 "Yun Xia's perceptive study traces the legal definition and the political usages of the profoundly emotive word hanjian (traitor). She looks at the years of the Resistance War and shows the ways in which the designation was used as China's political world was increasingly polarized." -Diana Lary

"Deeply researched and intriguing. Yun Xia details the scope of the traitor trials, which dwarfed the war crime trials of the Japanese." -Barak Kushner

"Wartime collaboration breeds treason trials-but trials in turn create collaborators by defining and punishing them. This book, the first in English, reconstructs the tangled political and legal processes in China that singled out those charged with aiding the Japan during the war, and that went on to influence mass campaigns after 1949." -Timothy Brook

Further information is available here.