Legal Sabotage - Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler''s Germany

A stirring account of the years that the leftist Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel spent in Nazi Germany resisting the regime.

List of contents

Introduction; 1. Setting the scene of a Jewish lawyer, like Fraenkel, in nazi Germany; 2. Fraenkel as a social democrat practicing law in nazi Germany; 3. Fraenkel as an essayist supporting the illegal underground; 4. Fraenkel as a scholar renouncing the nazi regime's dual state; 5. Thinking about legal justifications for sabotaging a tyrannical regime; Conclusion. The Ernst Fraenkel dilemma.

About the author

Douglas Morris is both a legal historian and a criminal defense attorney for indigent clients in New York City. He has published widely on twentieth-century German legal history and was a recipient of the 1998 Thurgood Marshall Award from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York for serving 'as pro bono counsel to a human being under a sentence of death'.

Summary

Readers will be fascinated by the resistance of Ernst Fraenkel within Nazi Germany. A Social Democratic Jewish lawyer, he represented political defendants, worked in the underground, and wrote a classic account of Nazism's law and politics. His gripping story shows the possibilities and limitations of using law against brutal authoritarian rule.

Additional text

'Ernst Fraenkel was an astonishing figure. For the first five years of the Nazi regime, this Jewish, Social Democratic lawyer courageously defended political opponents of Nazis in court, while also essaying brilliant underground critiques of the Nazi legal system. Morris, himself a practicing lawyer and an accomplished scholar, has written an elegant - and all too timely - study of the possibilities and limits of resistance to a regime of perverted legality.' Lawrence Douglas, James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College, and author of The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial

Product details

• Authors: Douglas Morris, Douglas G Morris, Douglas G. Morris, Morris Douglas, Morris Douglas G.
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2020
• EAN: 9781108835008
• ISBN: 978-1-108-83500-8
• No. of pages: 344
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law; Cambridge Studies in Constitut
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); History of Ideas, Germany, LAW / Legal History, Public International Law, Legal History, c 1938 to c 1946 (World War Two period), c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2), Constitutional & administrative law, Constitutional and administrative law: general, Jurisprudence & Philosophy Of Law, Methods, theory and philosophy of law, Public Health & Safety Law, Public health and safety law