This new course examines the relationship between law and the origins and implementation of the events known as the Holocaust. Through this case study students will consider the lessons for law and legal theory arising from Hitler’s rise to power, the legalization of the Nazi worldview through persecutory legislation targeting multiple groups on racial-biological grounds, the character of parallel legal measures in Vichy France and elsewhere, the challenge to our conceptions of legal and moral responsibility that is presented by the idea of ‘administrative massacre’, and the question of how the Nazi legal era has been represented in mainstream jurisprudence. By studying the sequential moments of legal and institutional pathology that provided the context for the persecution – loss of meaningful constitutionalism or constitutional values, loss of legal rights, loss of citizenship, loss of the standards of the rule of law, loss of the status of the legal subject as a bearer of dignity, amongst others – students will have the opportunity to think deeply about the significance of these pathologies for our understanding of what law is, what law should be, and what conditions are required for law to mediate power rather than merely provide a vehicle for its expression.

This course aims to give students the opportunity to think deeply about the significance of the debasement of law and legal institutions for our understanding of what law is and what law should be. Through the historical case study of the Holocaust, the course demonstrates the continuing salience of these questions.