A Symposium on Nazi Law

Carolyn Benson

Julian FinkDepartment of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria. We would like to thank the editors of Jurisprudence for inviting us to edit the present symposium, the anonymous referees for reviewing the submitted articles, and our authors for their contributions. The editing of this symposium was carried out under the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Distortions of Normativity’. We are grateful for the ERC's financial support.

Raymond Critch Law and Society Program and Department of Philosophy, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. This paper was completed as part of my work with the European Research Council Advance Grant project on ‘Distortions of Normativity' at the University of Vienna. It benefited greatly from detailed discussion there with Carolyn Benson, Julian Fink and Herlinde Pauer-Studer. It also benefited from a thorough reading by David Fraser as well as the anonymous reviewers and Ruth Massey at Jurisprudence. Thanks are also due to the audience at the ‘Authority, Legality, and Legitimacy' conference, in particular Peter Koller, Thomas Mertens, Liam Murphy and Joseph Raz.

Herlinde Pauer-Studer Research for this paper was funded by the ERC Advanced Research Grant ‘Distortions of Normativity'. I owe thanks to several colleagues for their interest in the project and their most valuable feedback. For extensive discussions on the case of the SS judge Konrad Morgen and helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper I would like to thank J David Velleman, who also provided the archive material from the US National Archives. Thanks also to Joan C Tronto for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Parts of this paper were presented at a conference on ‘Authority, Legality, and Legitimacy' funded by the ERC project ‘Distortions of Normativity' at the University of Vienna in May 2011. I would like to thank the participants of this conference, especially Julian Fink, Klaus Günther, Thomas Mertens, Liam Murphy, Fabienne Peter, Joseph Raz and Kristen Rundle for helpful responses and discussion. I also thank David Dyzenhaus, Veli Mitova, Carolyn Benson, Alexandra Couto and Christoph Hanisch for valuable discussions on the issue of Nazi law. Thanks to Philip Petti for a suggestion as to how to revise the original title of the paper. For historical information and discussions on the SS jurisdiction, and for help with the archive materials, I owe thanks to Christopher Theel. Thanks to Werner Konitzer and Raphael Gross from the Fritz-Bauer-Institut in Frankfurt am Main for motivating my interest in the case of Konrad Morgen and for supporting the search for archive documents on Morgen.

David Fraser Professor of Law and Social Theory, University of Nottingham, UK. An earlier version of this paper was presented in May 2011 at the conference ‘Authority, Legality, and Legitimacy' held at the Department of Philosophy and Department of Legal Philosophy, Law of Religion and Culture, University of Vienna. I would like to thank the conference participants for their sometimes charged, but always valuable, comments and criticisms. Thanks also to the anonymous referees and to Kathryn McMahon and Noel Whitty for their insights. All websites accessed 21 September 2012.

Kristen Rundle Lecturer, Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. I am indebted to Herlinde Pauer-Studer for the opportunity to participate in the ‘Authority, Legality, and Legitimacy' seminar held in Vienna in May 2011, and to Carolyn Benson and Julian Fink for their feedback on the final draft and for supporting my contribution to the present symposium. Thanks also to Liam Murphy, Joseph Raz, Thomas Mertens, Herlinde Pauer-Studer and David Velleman for interventions that greatly aided my revisions to earlier drafts of this paper.

Carolyn Benson

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