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Law's Past and Europe's Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Vivian Grosswald Curran

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As Europe forges its legal order, constitution, and self-understanding, many appear to believe that identifying and enacting laws and a legal framework that correspond to shared concepts of justice and human rights will solve the problem of legalized barbarism which once plagued Europe and which has been a recurrent feature throughout time and across the globe. The historical propensity of courts, even in democratic states, to legitimate and enable policies of persecution and discrimination provides compelling evidence that the current level of faith in law is misplaced.

Type
Articles: Special Issue Confronting Memories – Epilogue
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 2: Article: Special Issue - Confronting Memories: European „Bitter Experiences“ and the Constitutionalization Process , 01 February 2005 , pp. 483 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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7 See, generally, Ingo Müller, Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Deborah Lucas Schneider trans., 1991); Vivian Grosswald Curran, The Legalization of Racism in a Constitutional State: Democracy's Suicide in Vichy France, 50 Hastings L.J. 1 (1998) [hereinafter Legalization of Racism] (noting the recent academic trend that suggests the populace and judiciary supported the regime's behaviour).Google Scholar

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32 See discussion infra Part VI. For a comparison of the legal communities in Germany and France, arguing that many of the contrasting aspects are attributable to fascism's shorter duration of four years in France, as contrasted with twelve years in Germany, see Legalization of Racism (note 7). For a comprehensive account and analysis of the law in Vichy France, see Richard H. Weisberg, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (1996).Google Scholar

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37 See Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001) (arguing in favour of the Holocaust trials as legitimate and effective). But see Vivian Grosswald Curran, Atoms of the Law, 53 U. Toronto L.J. 305, 309–20 (2003) (disagreeing with Douglas’ conclusions and arguing that the non-judicial purposes of the Holocaust trials ultimately undermine law's credibility).Google Scholar

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60 Free law theory, sometimes blamed for making a king of the judge (“Richterkönig“), in fact said that the judge's task was to form rules only when “the formal law has a gap.” Hermann Kantorowicz, Some Rationalism About Realism, 43 Yale L. J. 1240, 1244 (1934).Google Scholar

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65 Brecht, Arnold, The Myth of Is and Ought, 54 Harv. L. Rev. 811, 824 (1941). For the Free Law School's views on natural law, see Vivian Grosswald Curran, Rethinking Hermann Kantorowicz: Free Law, American Legal Realism and the Legacy of Anti-Formalism, in: Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law 66, 79– 80 (Annelise Riles, ed., 2001) [hereinafter Rethinking Hermann Kantorowicz]. See, also, Vivian Grosswald Curran, Romantic Common Law, Enlightened Civil Law: Legal Uniformity and the Homogenization of the European Union, 7 Colum. J. Eur. L. 63, 110–11 (2001) [hereinafter Romantic Common Law].Google Scholar

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78 David Fraser, The Jews of the Channel Islands and the Rule of Law, 1940–1945: Quite contrary to the principles of British justice (2000).Google Scholar

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90 This argument is the principal theme of my article, Fear of Formalism (note 58).Google Scholar

91 See Romantic Common Law (note 65), 120–26 (exploring the implications of the common- and civil-law methodologies within the context of the European Union).Google Scholar

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