University of Wisconsin–Madison

Tag: Nazi Germany

Li (2025), “Two Kinds of Dual States: Judicial Empowerment and Disempowerment in Authoritarian Politics.”

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Zhiyu Li, “Two Kinds of Dual States: Judicial Empowerment and Disempowerment in Authoritarian Politics.” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, vol.58, no.1 (2025): 609-60. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5017955  Summary: Under the pretense of a national emergency, the Reichstag Fire Decree drastically reshaped the Weimar constitutional order in 1933. The legally undefined jurisdiction of martial law conferred …

Meiertöns (2014), “An International Lawyer in Democracy and Dictatorship–Re-Introducing Herbert Kraus”

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This article illustrates the dilemma lawyers face in authoritarian regimes—balancing resistance and survival—and highlights their potential role in both confronting and later rebuilding the rule of law.

Morris (2020), Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany

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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.

Luban (2021), “Complicity and Lesser Evils: A Tale of Two Lawyers”

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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.

Fybel (2022), “Judges, Lawyers, Legal Theorists, and the Law in Nazi Germany”

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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.

Müller (1992), Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich

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The role of the legal institution during the rise of Nazi Germany.