Law/Holocaust/Academy
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00237 |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| Author | F.C. DeCoste |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
REVIEW ARTICLE
Law/Holocaust/Academy
F.C. DeCoste*
Richard H. Weisberg,Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, New York: New
York University Press, 1996 xxiii + 447 pp, hb US$55.00, pb US$25.00.
The European Holocaust is an ethical and moral event beyond murder. ‘The central
historical moment of our time, and perhaps of all time’,1it transformed the very
conditions of morality and politics. Our moral and political imaginations have not
merely changed: since Auschwitz, the very notion of a benign human nature – on
which all else depends – has been compromised.
In the Preface to his The Destruction of the European Jews,2Hilberg reports that
when, in the 1940s and 1950s, he began his lifelong project of recording ‘how the
Jews of Europe were destroyed’, ‘the academic world was oblivious to the subject
of the Holocaust’, and that he ‘was advised much more often not to pursue this
topic than to persist in it’.3Writing, in the 1980s, about her experiences at Harvard
in the fifties, Judith Shklar in turn reports ‘a bizarre refusal to think through the real
meaning of the Second World War’.4Unhappily, not enough has since changed to
challenge the veracity of either of these reports. While it is true that there now
exists a fairly massive body of scholarship on the Holocaust, the burden for this
production has been siphoned off from the academy generally to scholars
specialising in the area.5In consequence, as regards the university more generally,
the Holocaust remains very much ‘the transformative event that has yet
transformed nothing’.6
The Holocaust has been offered an even less hospitable reception in the legal
academy. Indeed, despite a few, half-hearted and misdirected concessions
immediately after the War – I am thinking particularly of the unaccountably
influential Hart/Fuller debate, and of the courses on totalitarianism which, for a
short time, were offered in some law schools, especially in America7– it is fair to
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 1999 (MLR 62:5, September). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
792
*Faculty of Law, University of Alberta.
1 L.L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 184.
2 R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews: Three Volumes (New York: Holmes & Meier,
1985).
3ibid ix and xi.
4 J.N. Shklar, ‘A Life of Learning’ in Bernard Yack (ed), Liberalism without Illusions: Essays on Liberal
Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 263,
267.
5 Though not always: though I have not researched the matter, it is my impression that an unusually large
number of Holocaust scholars are not affiliated with any university.
6 J.R. Watson, ‘Hegel’s camera lucida: manufactured transparency in Holocaust imagery’ (1995) 21(3)
Philosophy & Social Criticism 111, 115.
7 See for example: S.P. Simpson and J. Stone, Cases and Readings on Law and Society, Book Three:
Law, Totalitarianism and Democracy (St Paul: West Publishing Co, 1949). For Shklar’s acerbic and
insightful commentary on these courses, which were offered throughout the American academy, see: n
4 above, 267–268.
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