Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- A Note on Translations -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1 Making Nazi Flags and Nazi Citizens -- The First Nuremberg Law: Of New York Jews and Nazi Flags -- The Second Nuremberg Law: Making Nazi Citizens -- America: The Global Leader in Racist Immigration Law -- American Second-Class Citizenship -- The Nazis Pick Up the Thread -- Toward the Citizenship Law: Nazi Politics in the Early 1930s -- The Nazis Look to American Second-Class Citizenship -- Conclusion -- CHAPTER 2 Protecting Nazi Blood and Nazi Honor -- Toward the Blood Law: Battles in the Streets and the Ministries -- Battles in the Streets: The Call for "Unambiguous Laws" -- Battles in the Ministries: The Prussian Memorandum and the American Example -- Conservative Juristic Resistance: Gürtner and Lösener -- The Meeting of June 5, 1934 -- The Sources of Nazi Knowledge of American Law -- Evaluating American Influence -- Defining "Mongrels": The One-Drop Rule and the Limits of American Influence -- CONCLUSION America through Nazi Eyes -- America's Place in the Global History of Racism -- Nazism and American Legal Culture -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Suggestions for Further Reading -- Index.

Well after the process of codification had begun elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe, ancient Roman law remained in use in Germany, expounded by brilliant scholars and applied in both urban and rural courts. The survival of this flourishing Roman legal culture into the industrial era is a familiar fact, but until now little effort has been made to explain it outside the province of specialized legal history. James Whitman seeks to remedy this neglect by exploring the broad political and cultural significance of German Roman law, emphasizing the hope on the part of German Roman lawyers that

Well after the process of codification had begun elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe, ancient Roman law remained in use in Germany, expounded by brilliant scholars and applied in both urban and rural courts. The survival of this flourishing Roman legal culture into the industrial era is a familiar fact, but until now little effort has been made to explain it outside the province of specialized legal history. James Whitman seeks to remedy this neglect by exploring the broad political and cultural significance of German Roman law, emphasizing the hope on the part of German Roman lawyers th

Intro -- Contents -- A Note to the Reader -- Introduction -- 1. Why Battles Matter -- 2. Accepting the Wager of Battle -- 3. Laying Just Claim to the Profits of War -- 4. The Monarchical Monopolization of Military Violence -- 5. Were There Really Rules? -- 6. The Death of Pitched Battle -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index.

Slaughter in battle was once seen as a legitimate way to settle disputes. When pitched battles ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. Whitman explains why ritualized violence was more effective in ending carnage, and why humanitarian laws that view war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts.

"To be convicted of a crime in the United States. a person must be proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt." But what is reasonable doubt? Even sophisticated legal experts find this fundamental doctrine difficult to explain. In this accessible book, James Q. Whitman digs deep into the history of the law and discovers that we have lost sight of the original purpose of "reasonable doubt." It was not originally a legal rule at all, he shows, but a theological one." "The rule as we understand it today is intended to protect the accused. But Whitman traces its history back through centuries of Christian theology and common-law history to reveal that the original concern was to protect the souls of jurors. In Christian tradition, a person who experienced doubt yet convicted an innocent defendant was guilty of a mortal sin. Jurors fearful for their own souls were reassured that they were safe, as long as their doubts were not "reasonable." Today, the old rule of reasonable doubt survives, but it has been turned to different purposes. The result is confusion for jurors, and a serious moral challenge for our system of justice."--Jacket

Introduction. 1. Degradation, Harshness, and Mercy. 2. Contemporary American Harshness: Rejecting Respect for Persons. 3. Continental Dignity and Mildness. 4. The Continental Abolition of Degradation. 5. Low Status in the Anglo-American World. Conclusion: Two Revolutions of Status. Notes. Bibliography. Index

Criminal justice in America is harsh and degrading when compared to other countries in the West. By contrast, France and Germany are systematically mild. Whitman suggests that the difference results from America's non-hierarchical social system and distrust of state power.

This contribution describes the life and work of an American law professor who writes about European legal history. It is a sad truth that American interest in European scholarship has been in steady decline for some decades. The author remains a believer in the fundamental importance of European legal history despite that; the contribution describes his quarter century of research in the United States, and his efforts, not always successful, to convince his colleagues that Europe matters. After beginning his career working on the German history of Roman law, the author was drawn into topics that spoke more directly to the dilemmas and oddities of American life. Many of those topics involved the comparative legal history of dignity; more recently they have included work on criminal procedure and the law of war.

This contribution to a symposium on Loïc Wacquant's Punishing the Poor endorses Wacquant's claim that the extraordinary increase in American punitiveness over the last 35 years must be seen in the context of market-friendly American neo-liberalism. However, the contribution expresses some doubt about whether American-style neo-liberalism, and American-style punishment, are likely to dominate in countries like France. American punishment practices rest on some distinctive American values, including equality of opportunity, a certain moralism in the understanding of criminal law, and a resistance to deference to expert bureaucratic authority. Because those values are less influential in the law of countries like France, the American punishment revolution is unlikely to be successfully transplanted.