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ABSTRACT
This concluding article draws together some of the connecting strands between the preceding four articles, seeking to outline a number of fundamental issues common to them all and ultimately the legal concept of universality in general. I argue that there is a fundamental Eurocentrism present that has a number of implications, ranging from the hierarchical worldview and its ingrained evolutionary basis to the notion of communities beyond the nation state which would in the guise of benevolence impose and dictate both law and values with an universal reach and finally, an idea that legal concepts were in an by themselves universal. What these had in common was that they were based on an understanding of humanity as universal, a certain concept of concept as universal and, finally, resorting to a very particular concept of universal rights. However, despite the manifold claims of universality, the practical application and interpretation of these rights was exceedingly limited to a certain group and a certain time and a place.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The history of early anthropology and law is full of imaginative hyperbole; see George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987); Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth, 2nd ed. (1988; London: Routledge, 2005); Kaius Tuori, Lawyers and Savages: Ancient History and Legal Realism in the Making of Legal Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 2015).
2 Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Von Dem Rechtszustand Unter Den Ureinwohnern Brasiliens (München, 1832); Tuori, Lawyers and Savages, 22–6.
3 This is a notion that authors such as Chakrabarty (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000)) have suggested is typical of European histories of the non-modern experience: the recurrence of words such as lacking, absence or missing. As a problem of historical ontology, see Greg Anderson, ‘Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: The Case for an Ontological Turn’, The American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (2015): 787–810, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.3.787.
4 On the need of lineage as a European constant, see Simon Goldhill, Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 2–8.
5 The most famous example of the ladder theorists of social evolutionism was Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881). Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, (1877; repr., Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985). Albert Post, Die Grundlagen des Rechts und die Grundzüge seiner Entwicklungsgeschichte. Leitgedanken für den Aufbau einer allgemeinen Rechtswissenschaft auf soziologischer Basis (Oldenburg, 1884); Arthur Berriedale Keith, The Constitution Administration and Laws of the Empire (Glasgow, 1924); Josef Kohler, Shakespeare vor dem Forum der Jurisprudenz (Berlin, 1919).
6 To quote the founders of the Institut de Droit International as memorably outlined in Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–97.
7 See, e.g. the critical input of Pauline E. Peters, ‘Challenges in Land Tenure and Land Reform in Africa: Anthropological Contributions’, World Development 37, no. 8 (2009): 1317–25, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2008.08.021.
8 Some were compiled by anthropologists, see I. Schapera, A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. Compiled for the Bechuanaland Protectorate Administration (Oxford, 1938). On the restatements, Antony N. Allott, ‘The Judicial Ascertainment of Customary Law in British Africa’, Modern Law Review, 20 (1957): 244–63; Brett Schadle, ‘Changing Traditions to Meet Current Altering Conditions: Customary Law, African Courts and the Rejection of Codification in Kenya, 1930–60’, The Journal of African History 40, no. 3 (1999): 411. On tribal constitutions, see Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism (Ithaca, 2007); Stephen Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2010); Deborah Rosen, American Indian and State Law. Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship, 1790–1880 (Lincoln, 2007)
9 In the legal sense, this was characterized first and foremost by F. C. von Savigny, Gustav Hugo and Jacob Grimm.
10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Penguin, 2017), 388. On the implications of Arendt’s statement, see Alison Kesby, The Right to Have Rights: Citizenship, Humanity, and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
11 This was already pointed out in Karl Marx, ‘Zur Judenfrage’, in Marx-Engels-Werke, Bd. 1 (1844; repr., Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin, 2017), 347–77.
12 Hersch Lauterpacht, Private Law Sources and Analogies of International Law (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1927); Kaius Tuori, ‘The Reception of Ancient International Law in the Early Modern Period’, in The Oxford Handbook for the History of International Law, eds. Bardo Fassbender, Anne Peters, and Simone Peter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1012‒33.
13 Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4–5.
14 On the linkages between intellectuals promoting nationalistic policies and the Vichy regime, see Stéphanie Corcy-Debray, Jérôme Carcopino, Un Historien à Vichy (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 2001).
15 Michael Stolleis, Public Law in Germany 1914–1945, trans. Thomas Dunlop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 59.
16 The literature on indigenous dispossession and its legal ramifications is vast; see Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); idem, Possessing the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Mark Hickford, Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Kaius Tuori, ‘The Theory and Practice of Indigenous Dispossession in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Saami in the Far North of Europe and the Legal History of Colonialism’, Comparative Legal History 3, no. 1 (2015): 152–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/2049677X.2015.1041732.
17 The self-image of the legal profession and its role during the Nazi years was challenged only in 1968 with the publication of Berndt Rüthers, Die Unbegrenzte Auslegung. Zum Wandel Der Privatrechtsordnung Im Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). See also A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
18 Thomas Duve and Joachim Rückert, eds., Savigny international? (Frankfurt am Main (Germany): Vittorio Klostermann, 2016).
19 On the import of European law globally and its impact, see Matthew C. Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.)
20 Viktor Winkler, Der Kampf gegen die Rechtswissenschaft. Franz Wieackers ‘Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit‘ und die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovač, 2014), 238–46.
21 On the uses of Western legal concepts in indigenous dispossession, see Martin Chanock, ‘Paradigms, Policies and Property: A Review of the Customary Law of Land Tenure’, in Law in Colonial Africa, eds. Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991); Antony N. Allott, ‘Aboriginal Rights and Wrongs: The Mabo Land Case’, Law & Justice: Christian Law Review 118/119 (1993): 84; T. W. Bennett, ‘Terminology and Land Tenure in Customary Law: An Exercise in Linguistic Theory’, Acta Juridica (Cape Town) (1985): 176–7.
22 On those who sought to protect the law, see Douglas Morris, ‘Discrimination, degradation, defiance: Jewish lawyers under Nazism’, in The Law in Nazi Germany: Ideology, Opportunism, and the Perversion of Justice, eds. Alan E. Steinweis and Robert D. Rachlin (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 124–8; Jens Meierhenrich, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Douglas Morris, Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
23 Most professors were able to continue their careers and all but the worst Nazi criminals were given amnesty; see Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). On the mental gymnastics required to survive in the scientific world, see Franz-Stefan Meissel and Stefan Wedrac, ‘Strategien der Anpassung – Römisches Recht im Zeichen des Hakenkreuzes’, in Vertriebenes Recht – Vertreibendes Recht. Die Wiener Rechts- Und Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät 1938–1945, eds. Franz-Stefan Meissel, Thomas Olechowski, Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal, and Stefan Schima (Wien: MANZ Verlag, 2012), 35–78. On the normalization of Nazism and one’s own behaviour under Nazism in Germany, see Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (London and Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2003).
24 The literature on exile scholars is vast: Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe 1930–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983); Karen J. Greenberg, ‘The Mentor Within: The German Refugee Scholars of the Nazi Period and their American Context’ (PhD diss., unpublished, Yale, 1987); Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Mitchell G. Ash and Alfons Söllner, eds., Forced Migration and Scientific Change: Émigré German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars After 1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Felix Rösch, Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of International Relations: A European Discipline in America? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); David Kettler, The Liquidation of Exile: Studies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2011); Alfons Söllner, Political Scholar: Zur Intellektuellengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Germany: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2018); Antoon de Baets and Stefan Berger eds., Writing History in Exile. Storia della Storiografia 69, no. 1 (2016); Sally Crawford, Katharina Ulmschneider, and Jas Elsner, eds., Ark of Civilization: Refugee Scholars and Oxford University, 1930–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Seyla Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Daniel Bessner, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018); Judith Friedlander, A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and its University in Exile (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). On legal scholars in particular, see Jack Beatson and Reinhard Zimmermann, Jurists Uprooted: German-Speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); see also Magdalena Kmak, ‘The Impact of Exile on Law and Legal Science 1934–64’, in Roman Law and the Idea of Europe, eds. Kaius Tuori and Heta Björklund (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 15–34; Kyle Graham, ‘The Refugee Jurist and American Law Schools, 1933–1941’, American Journal of Comparative Law 50 no. 4 (2002): 777–818, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/50.4.777; Marcus Lutter, Ernst C. Stiefel, and Michael H. Hoeflich, eds., Der Einfluß deutscher Emigranten auf die Rechtsentwicklung in den USA und in Deutschland. Vorträge und Referate des Bonner Symposions im September 1991 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993); Leonie Breunung and Manfred Walther, Biographisches Handbuch der Emigration deutschsprachiger Rechtswissenschaftler ab 1933, Bd. 1 (Göttingen: de Gruyter, 2012).
25 Anne M. Kornhauser, Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
26 On the return to natural law after WWII, see Kristian Kühl, ‘Rückblick auf die Renaissance des Naturrechts nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft: Ars Tradendo Innovandoque Aequitatem Sectandi; Freundesgabe für Alfred Söllner zum 60. Geburtstag am 5.2.1990. Giessener Rechtswissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, Bd. 6, eds. Gerhard Köblerl, Meinhard Heinze, and Jan Schapp (Brühl: Giessen, 1990), 331–57.
27 Fabian Wittreck, Nationalsozialistische Rechtslehre und Naturrecht: Affinität und Aversion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 35–55.
28 Paul Koschaker, Europa und das römische Recht, 4th ed. (1947; Munich and Berlin: Beck, 1966), 346.