This biography traces Ernst Fraenkel’s legal resistance to the Nazi regime, highlighting his defense of political dissidents and underground activism that shaped his seminal work.
Europe
Jakab (2020), “Informal Institutional Elements as Both Preconditions and Consequences of Effective Formal Legal Rules: The Failure of Constitutional Institution Building in Hungary”
An analysis of the role of Hungarian lawyers who are blind and to a certain extent, also defenseless against recent authoritarian tendencies.
Titaev and Shkliaruk (2016), “Investigators in Russia: Who Creates Practice in the Investigation of Criminal Cases”
Analyzes the role of investigators in the Russian criminal justice process.
Solomon, Jr. (1987), “The Case of the Vanishing Acquittal: Informal Norms and the Practice of Soviet Criminal Justice”
Explains the institutional reasons behind the decrease in acquittals following the death of Stalin due to the fears of judges and prosecutors of being held accountable for bringing unsustainable cases.
Newcity (2005), “Why Is There No Russian Atticus Finch? Or Even a Russian Rumpole”
An exploration of the differences in the societal expectations of lawyers in the United States and Russia, concluding that the sort of respect afforded to Atticus Finch is notably absent in Russia.
Khozhdaeva and Rabovski (2016), “Strategies and Tactics of Criminal Defenders in Russia in the Context of Accusatorial Bias”
Analysis of the institutional weakness of criminal defense lawyers in Russia due to the informal coalition between judges and prosecutors.
Luban (2021), “Complicity and Lesser Evils: A Tale of Two Lawyers”
This Article explores that dilemma in a stark form: through the moral biographies of two lawyers in the Third Reich, both of whom stayed on the job, and both of whom can lay claim to mitigating evil.
Gatto (2016), “Race Law Revisited: A Brief Review of Anti-Semitism and the Role of Lawyers in Fascist Italy”
This article analyzes the ethical dilemmas faced by Italian lawyers during World War II, focusing on their roles in Fascist society, their responses to Mussolini’s 1938 race laws, and their involvement in addressing the treatment of Jews in Italy, drawing on legal histories and survivor narratives.
Fybel (2022), “Judges, Lawyers, Legal Theorists, and the Law in Nazi Germany”
This essay argues that the German legal system, including courts, judges, and lawyers, enabled and often supported the Nazi regime’s rise and its race-based atrocities by legitimizing Hitler’s incremental consolidation of power under the guise of law.
Gadowska (2020), “Poland: Opening the Legal Profession”
This chapter explores how reforms in the recruitment of self-governing lawyer councils between 1989 and 2017 expanded access to the legal profession and improved the availability of legal services through a 15-year process of social and legal change.