I've recently come across a fascinating monograph that deserves attention from (among others) those who like to think about the roles that lawyers play in systems of repression and about the differences between law and morality in the professional lives of lawyers.
It's David Fraser's The Jews of the Channel Islands and the Rule of Law, 1940-1945 (Sussex Academic Press, 2000).
The Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey, and Sark) are British Crown Dependencies that sit in the English Channel off France's Normandy coast. They were the only British territories that the Germans occupied during World War II -- from July of 1940 to May of 1945.
What Fraser documents is the alacrity with which the British-trained legal elite of the Channel Islands hopped to the task of implementing German orders for the registration and repression (including forced property "aryanization") of the Islands' (few) Jews.
It is shocking on several levels. For American lawyers, the case of the Channel Islands removes many of the layers of distance we put between ourselves and the lawyers of the Third Reich: the Channel Island lawyers' training was rather like ours; their legal traditions derived from many of the same sources as ours; their understanding of the role of the lawyer resembles ours. And of course the evidence of their oppression is in our language, English. Looking at these lawyers through American eyes is chilling in a way that looking at the lawyers of the Third Reich or of Vichy is not.
If you have confidence that the American legal profession would never accede to a system of legalized terror like Nazi Germany's -- that it would not, in Richard Weisberg's phrasing, develop a "hermeneutic of acceptance" of a discourse of legalized repression -- this little book will shatter that confidence.
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