This highly original book examines the function of legal norms and institutions in the transition to and from apartheid. It sheds light on the neglected relationship between path dependence and the law. The Legacies of Law demonstrates that legal norms and institutions, even illiberal ones, can have an important and hitherto undertheorized structuring effect on democratic transitions.
Focusing on South Africa during the period 1650 2000, Jens Meierhenrich finds that under certain conditions, law reduces uncertainty in democratization by invoking common cultural backgrounds and...

Genocide is a phenomenon that continues to confound scholars, practitioners, and general readers. Notwithstanding the carnage of the twentieth century, our understanding of genocide remains partial. Disciplinary boundaries have inhibited integrative studies and popular, moralizing accounts have hindered comprehension by advancing simple truths in an area where none are to be had. Genocide: A Reader lays the foundations for an improved understanding of genocide. With the help of 150 essential contributions, Jens Meierhenrich provides a unique introduction to the myriad dimensions of...

Genocide is a phenomenon that continues to confound scholars, practitioners, and general readers. Notwithstanding the carnage of the twentieth century, our understanding of genocide remains partial. Disciplinary boundaries have inhibited integrative studies and popular, moralizing accounts have hindered comprehension by advancing simple truths in an area where none are to be had. Genocide: A Reader lays the foundations for an improved understanding of genocide. With the help of 150 essential contributions, Jens Meierhenrich provides a unique introduction to the myriad dimensions of...

The Dual State, first published in 1941, remains one of the most erudite
books on the logic of dictatorship. It was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National Socialism-and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany. Ernst Fraenkel's courageous ethnography of law was widely acclaimed upon publication, and it has influenced considerably postwar debates about the nature of the "Third Reich." But The Dual State also has relevance for the study of dictatorship in the twenty-first century. Fraenkel's innovative concept of "the dual state," with...

The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt collects thirty original chapters on the diverse oeuvre of one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was a German theorist whose anti-liberalism continues to inspire scholars and practitioners on both the Left and the Right. Despite Schmitt's rabid antisemitism and partisan legal practice in Nazi Germany, the appeal of his trenchant critiques of, among other things, aestheticism, representative democracy, and international law as well as of his theoretical justifications of dictatorship and rule by...

This book offers an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's classic The Dual State (1941), recently republished by OUP, and one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. It was the first comprehensive analysis of the nature and rise of Nazism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany.

This book presents an empirically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated account of political trials.