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David Fraser

University of Nottingham, Law, Faculty Member

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My most recent publication is "Nazi Antisemitism and Jewish Legal Self-defense: The Turn to Law in Liberal Democracies, 1932-39," (Routledge Studies in Comparative Legal History, 2023). My research focuses on legal aspects of the Shoah and National Socialism and on modern and contemporary encounters between Jewish communities and non-Jewish legal orders. I also work on various aspects of law and popular culture.

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New York University Abu Dhabi

National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"

University of Genova

François Soyer

University of New England - Australia

Université de Genève

Alejandra B Osorio

Wellesley College

Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

Cristiana Facchini

Università di Bologna

University of Haifa

University of Cologne

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Books by David Fraser

Review fraser on berger

Afterword Emergencies Exceptions Legalities

States of Exception: Law History Theory, 2020

This is the afterword to a collection of critical essays on the state of exception.

Criminal Law in Auschwitz

Ideology and Criminal Law: Fascist, National Socialist and Authoritarian Regimes, 2019

This paper uses the career of SS lawyer Konrad Morgen as a way into current historical and legal ... more This paper uses the career of SS lawyer Konrad Morgen as a way into current historical and legal debates about the nature and function of Nazi law. It argues that traditional natural law and positivism can each be used to understand Nazi law as law, just as they have been used to dispute Nazi law's juridical standing. This points to the need for a different critical engagement with law and history to properly situate law during theThird Reich

Criminal Law in the Criminal State: Re-imagining the Jurisprudence of Nazi Law

Anti-Shechita Prosecutions in the Anglo-American World, 1855–1913: “A major attack on Jewish freedoms” (Sampler)

by Academic Studies Press and David Fraser

This is the first study of historical attempts by animal welfare groups to ban the Jewish method ... more This is the first study of historical attempts by animal welfare groups to ban the Jewish method of slaughter (shechita). It details cases from Australia, Canada, England, Scotland, and the United States, many for the first time, in which anti-animal cruelty groups prosecuted those engaged in shechita as part of their attempts to introduce compulsory stunning of animals before slaughter. Despite claims to the contrary, this study offers clear evidence of underlying, unrelenting antisemitic motivations in the prosecutions, and highlights the ways in which a basic idea of innate Jewish cruelty was always juxtaposed with an overtly Christian ideal of humane treatment of animals across time and borders.

Anti-shechita prosecutions in the English-speaking world 1855-1913.pdf

This is the first study of efforts by "humane societies" in England, Scotland, Australia, Canada,... more This is the first study of efforts by "humane societies" in England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, and the United States to end the practice of shechita (the Jewish method of killing animals for food) by bringing criminal prosecutions for animal cruelty against shochetim. It reveals the fundamental contradictions between religious practice and tradition opposed to cruelty and a limited and narrow understanding of "humanity" and "civilization" that excluded Jewish religious practice and belief and drove these prosecutions/persecutions from the mid-19th century until the eve of WW 1.

"Honorary Protestants": The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997

This book studies the ways in which the Jewish communities of Montreal struggled for the right to... more

Daviborshch's Cart: Narrating the Holocaust in Australian War Crimes Trials

This is the first full account of the three cases brought by prosecutors against three alleged Ho... more This is the first full account of the three cases brought by prosecutors against three alleged Holocaust perpetrators, Ivan Polyukhovich, Heinrich Wagner and Mikolay Berezowsky, in Australia in the early 1990s. Based in heretofore unexamined archival records, the book tells the story of Australian attempts to seek justice for victims of the Shoah more than fifty years after the events in Ukraine which featured as the background to the three cases. It explores these events through the lens of the competing discourses of law, history and literature and the demands of justice and memory.

Daviborshch's Cart: Narrating the Holocaust in Australian War Crimes Trials

This is the first full account of the three cases brought by prosecutors against three alleged Ho... more This is the first full account of the three cases brought by prosecutors against three alleged Holocaust perpetrators, Ivan Polyukhovich, Heinrich Wagner and Mikolay Berezowsky, in Australia in the early 1990s. Based in heretofore unexamined archival records, the book tells the story of Australian attempts to seek justice for victims of the Shoah more than fifty years after the events in Ukraine which featured as the background to the three cases. It explores these events through the lens of the competing discourses of law, history and literature and the demands of justice and memory.

Law After Auschwitz: Towards A Jurisprudence Of The Holocaust

The Fragility of Law: Constitutional Patriotism, Collaboration and the Jews of Belgium, 1940-1945

Based on extensive archival research in Belgium, France, the United States and Israel, The Fragil... more Based on extensive archival research in Belgium, France, the United States and Israel, The Fragility of Law offers the first detailed exploration in English of this intriguing and virtually unexplored episode of Holocaust history. Belgian legal officials did not hesitate to invoke the provisions of international law found in the Hague Convention and those guarantees of individual freedom found in the national Constitution to oppose the demands of the German Occupying Authority. However, they remained largely silent when anti-Jewish persecution was at stake. Indeed, despite the 2007 official report of expert historians on Belgian state collaboration in the persecution of the country’s Jewish population, the mythology of passive collaboration which has dominated Belgian historiography and accounts of the Holocaust in that country, must be radically rethought.

The Jews of the Channel Islands and the Rule 1940-45: "Quite contrary to the principles of British justice'

Papers by David Fraser

Sexual Orientation and Canadian Law and Lesbians, Gay Men and Canadian Law [Book Review]

(Re-‐)locating the Roma, (Re-‐)imagining Citizenship: Nicolas Sarkozy and the New/Old European Order

Evil Law, Evil Lawyers? From the Justice Case to the Torture Memos

Capitalism, Jews, Law: Prolegomena to a Critical Legal History of the Shoah

ABSTRACT

Review of William E. Conklin, The Phenomenology of Modern Legal Discourse

In his detailed, nuanced, but ultimately flawed study, William Conklin offers his reading of the ... more In his detailed, nuanced, but ultimately flawed study, William Conklin offers his reading of the ways in which law and lawyers participate in, as he puts it in the book's subtitle, "the juridical production and the disclosure of suffering." Conklin's thesis is that law translates and transforms experiences in a manner which both suppresses the real suffering of the "victim" and consequently, produces even more suffering. Because the legal system pits professional language makers and producers, what he calls the "knowers", against the ordinary lived experiences of "non-knowers", The particularity of an individual's experiences is camouflaged, if not denied, by the knower's play inside the legal discourse of a modern state. (p. 47) Thereafter, The juridical official is immersed in an idealizing production. The interpreter privileges a particular configuration which loses the particular social context of the non-knower's story. (p. 177) Thus, according to Conklin, the suffering of the victim is both exacerbated by and created within the system of legal discourse. His critique is wideranging, and includes a study of Kafka's The Trial, the legal philosophies of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Lord Haldane and detailed examinations of several "cases" from the United States and Canada. His analysis deploys and critiques the works of Peirce, Saussure, Greimas, Jackson and Arnaud, as well as Critical and Feminist Legal Studies. While he obviously is influenced by and borrows from each of these disciplinary traditions, Conklin seeks to transcend the difficulties which he sees in each in order to arrive at a legal theory, or a theory of legal practice, which will eliminate the suffering and violence he identifies as the inevitable result of law. He claims to arrive at this point through a pastiche of Lyotard's differend, Bakhtin's

Law's ‘Jewish Question’? The Holocaust and Critical Theory

Modern Law Review, 2009

To belong or not to belong: the Roma, state violence and the new Europe in the House of Lords

Legal Studies, 2001

Issues of national sovereignty and membership in the body politic are central to many current pol... more Issues of national sovereignty and membership in the body politic are central to many current political and legal debates surrounding ‘New Britain’ and Europe. Traditional understandings of citizenship and belonging are grounded in the ideal of a territorially limited and defined nation state. In this article, I explore a series of judicial and political decisions surrounding the fate of Roma or Gypsies, both as claimants to refugee status in Britain, or as subjects of domestic legal controls. I argue that these decisions construct this nomadic Other as a fundamental danger and challenge to the coherence of the legally protected body politic of the nation state ‘Britain’. I argue that the deconstructive excess found in the construction of the Roma as dangerous nomads, without allegiance to a fixed and geographically delimited nation state, might contain the kernel for a possible re-imagining of the basis of our understandings of citizenship and belonging.

THE PROVINCE OF JURISPRUDENCE DEMOCRATIZED by ALLAN C. HUTCHINSON

Journal of Law and Society, 2009

The great Canadian legal philosopher, Leonard Cohen, has long claimed that Democracy is coming to... more The great Canadian legal philosopher, Leonard Cohen, has long claimed that Democracy is coming to the USA'. 1 Another leading Canadian (by way of Manchester) jurisprudential thinker, Allan Hutchinson, adds nuance to Cohen's vision by arguing, in his typically insightful fashion, that if democracy is indeed coming, two interrelated roadblocks stand in the way. For Hutchinson, both the practice of legal theory in the academy and judicial review by the courts are, at their cores, fundamentally undemocratic. The first main thrust of Hutchinson's latest provocative intervention, The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized, can be found in the opening lines of the book: Contemporary jurisprudence is based on a heist of spectacular proportions. Perpetrated over 175 years ago and carried on by subsequent generations of jurists, the general study of law has been hijacked by a strictly jurisprudential approach. 2 For Hutchinson, analytical jurisprudence, in all its variants, has committed and perpetuated one original sin, the denial and obfuscation of law's fundamentally social and political essence. The tradition of Anglo-American legal theory is deeply implicated in a process of masking the true nature of law, for Hutchinson, a contingent, and messy, political process, beneath the pretence that law is neutral and apolitical, that law is law. Grounded in a similar jurisprudential position, judicial review then concretizes the theoretical miasma of legal theory by applying`law' in situations which are at their core, political, social, and economic. Hutchinson does not so much advocate the notion of the counter-majoritarian difficulty most often associated with critiques of judicial review as undemocratic as attack legal reasoning itself as undemocratic. As detailed throughout The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized, both legal theory and legal practice serve to obfuscate the political nature of social existence. Hutchinson spares no one in his spirited, and insightful, attack on the fundamental self-denial of legal thinking. From John Austin, to Herbert Hart, and thence to Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, Jules Coleman, Jeremy Waldron, and Brian Leiter, among others, Hutchinson cuts a bloody, but often humorous, swathe through the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence, laying waste centuries of legal philosophy as he demonstrates the fundamental error of any pretence that`law' has an essence or a core which can be found outside of politics, sociology, or economics. The self-satisfied,

Review fraser on berger

Afterword Emergencies Exceptions Legalities

States of Exception: Law History Theory, 2020

This is the afterword to a collection of critical essays on the state of exception.

Criminal Law in Auschwitz

Ideology and Criminal Law: Fascist, National Socialist and Authoritarian Regimes, 2019

This paper uses the career of SS lawyer Konrad Morgen as a way into current historical and legal ... more This paper uses the career of SS lawyer Konrad Morgen as a way into current historical and legal debates about the nature and function of Nazi law. It argues that traditional natural law and positivism can each be used to understand Nazi law as law, just as they have been used to dispute Nazi law's juridical standing. This points to the need for a different critical engagement with law and history to properly situate law during theThird Reich

Criminal Law in the Criminal State: Re-imagining the Jurisprudence of Nazi Law

Anti-Shechita Prosecutions in the Anglo-American World, 1855–1913: “A major attack on Jewish freedoms” (Sampler)

by Academic Studies Press and David Fraser

This is the first study of historical attempts by animal welfare groups to ban the Jewish method ... more This is the first study of historical attempts by animal welfare groups to ban the Jewish method of slaughter (shechita). It details cases from Australia, Canada, England, Scotland, and the United States, many for the first time, in which anti-animal cruelty groups prosecuted those engaged in shechita as part of their attempts to introduce compulsory stunning of animals before slaughter. Despite claims to the contrary, this study offers clear evidence of underlying, unrelenting antisemitic motivations in the prosecutions, and highlights the ways in which a basic idea of innate Jewish cruelty was always juxtaposed with an overtly Christian ideal of humane treatment of animals across time and borders.

Anti-shechita prosecutions in the English-speaking world 1855-1913.pdf

This is the first study of efforts by "humane societies" in England, Scotland, Australia, Canada,... more This is the first study of efforts by "humane societies" in England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, and the United States to end the practice of shechita (the Jewish method of killing animals for food) by bringing criminal prosecutions for animal cruelty against shochetim. It reveals the fundamental contradictions between religious practice and tradition opposed to cruelty and a limited and narrow understanding of "humanity" and "civilization" that excluded Jewish religious practice and belief and drove these prosecutions/persecutions from the mid-19th century until the eve of WW 1.

"Honorary Protestants": The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997

This book studies the ways in which the Jewish communities of Montreal struggled for the right to... more

Daviborshch's Cart: Narrating the Holocaust in Australian War Crimes Trials

This is the first full account of the three cases brought by prosecutors against three alleged Ho... more This is the first full account of the three cases brought by prosecutors against three alleged Holocaust perpetrators, Ivan Polyukhovich, Heinrich Wagner and Mikolay Berezowsky, in Australia in the early 1990s. Based in heretofore unexamined archival records, the book tells the story of Australian attempts to seek justice for victims of the Shoah more than fifty years after the events in Ukraine which featured as the background to the three cases. It explores these events through the lens of the competing discourses of law, history and literature and the demands of justice and memory.

Daviborshch's Cart: Narrating the Holocaust in Australian War Crimes Trials

This is the first full account of the three cases brought by prosecutors against three alleged Ho... more This is the first full account of the three cases brought by prosecutors against three alleged Holocaust perpetrators, Ivan Polyukhovich, Heinrich Wagner and Mikolay Berezowsky, in Australia in the early 1990s. Based in heretofore unexamined archival records, the book tells the story of Australian attempts to seek justice for victims of the Shoah more than fifty years after the events in Ukraine which featured as the background to the three cases. It explores these events through the lens of the competing discourses of law, history and literature and the demands of justice and memory.

Law After Auschwitz: Towards A Jurisprudence Of The Holocaust

The Fragility of Law: Constitutional Patriotism, Collaboration and the Jews of Belgium, 1940-1945

Based on extensive archival research in Belgium, France, the United States and Israel, The Fragil... more Based on extensive archival research in Belgium, France, the United States and Israel, The Fragility of Law offers the first detailed exploration in English of this intriguing and virtually unexplored episode of Holocaust history. Belgian legal officials did not hesitate to invoke the provisions of international law found in the Hague Convention and those guarantees of individual freedom found in the national Constitution to oppose the demands of the German Occupying Authority. However, they remained largely silent when anti-Jewish persecution was at stake. Indeed, despite the 2007 official report of expert historians on Belgian state collaboration in the persecution of the country’s Jewish population, the mythology of passive collaboration which has dominated Belgian historiography and accounts of the Holocaust in that country, must be radically rethought.

The Jews of the Channel Islands and the Rule 1940-45: "Quite contrary to the principles of British justice'

Sexual Orientation and Canadian Law and Lesbians, Gay Men and Canadian Law [Book Review]

(Re-‐)locating the Roma, (Re-‐)imagining Citizenship: Nicolas Sarkozy and the New/Old European Order

Evil Law, Evil Lawyers? From the Justice Case to the Torture Memos

Capitalism, Jews, Law: Prolegomena to a Critical Legal History of the Shoah

ABSTRACT

Review of William E. Conklin, The Phenomenology of Modern Legal Discourse

In his detailed, nuanced, but ultimately flawed study, William Conklin offers his reading of the ... more In his detailed, nuanced, but ultimately flawed study, William Conklin offers his reading of the ways in which law and lawyers participate in, as he puts it in the book's subtitle, "the juridical production and the disclosure of suffering." Conklin's thesis is that law translates and transforms experiences in a manner which both suppresses the real suffering of the "victim" and consequently, produces even more suffering. Because the legal system pits professional language makers and producers, what he calls the "knowers", against the ordinary lived experiences of "non-knowers", The particularity of an individual's experiences is camouflaged, if not denied, by the knower's play inside the legal discourse of a modern state. (p. 47) Thereafter, The juridical official is immersed in an idealizing production. The interpreter privileges a particular configuration which loses the particular social context of the non-knower's story. (p. 177) Thus, according to Conklin, the suffering of the victim is both exacerbated by and created within the system of legal discourse. His critique is wideranging, and includes a study of Kafka's The Trial, the legal philosophies of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Lord Haldane and detailed examinations of several "cases" from the United States and Canada. His analysis deploys and critiques the works of Peirce, Saussure, Greimas, Jackson and Arnaud, as well as Critical and Feminist Legal Studies. While he obviously is influenced by and borrows from each of these disciplinary traditions, Conklin seeks to transcend the difficulties which he sees in each in order to arrive at a legal theory, or a theory of legal practice, which will eliminate the suffering and violence he identifies as the inevitable result of law. He claims to arrive at this point through a pastiche of Lyotard's differend, Bakhtin's

Law's ‘Jewish Question’? The Holocaust and Critical Theory

Modern Law Review, 2009

To belong or not to belong: the Roma, state violence and the new Europe in the House of Lords

Legal Studies, 2001

Issues of national sovereignty and membership in the body politic are central to many current pol... more Issues of national sovereignty and membership in the body politic are central to many current political and legal debates surrounding ‘New Britain’ and Europe. Traditional understandings of citizenship and belonging are grounded in the ideal of a territorially limited and defined nation state. In this article, I explore a series of judicial and political decisions surrounding the fate of Roma or Gypsies, both as claimants to refugee status in Britain, or as subjects of domestic legal controls. I argue that these decisions construct this nomadic Other as a fundamental danger and challenge to the coherence of the legally protected body politic of the nation state ‘Britain’. I argue that the deconstructive excess found in the construction of the Roma as dangerous nomads, without allegiance to a fixed and geographically delimited nation state, might contain the kernel for a possible re-imagining of the basis of our understandings of citizenship and belonging.

THE PROVINCE OF JURISPRUDENCE DEMOCRATIZED by ALLAN C. HUTCHINSON

Journal of Law and Society, 2009

The great Canadian legal philosopher, Leonard Cohen, has long claimed that Democracy is coming to... more The great Canadian legal philosopher, Leonard Cohen, has long claimed that Democracy is coming to the USA'. 1 Another leading Canadian (by way of Manchester) jurisprudential thinker, Allan Hutchinson, adds nuance to Cohen's vision by arguing, in his typically insightful fashion, that if democracy is indeed coming, two interrelated roadblocks stand in the way. For Hutchinson, both the practice of legal theory in the academy and judicial review by the courts are, at their cores, fundamentally undemocratic. The first main thrust of Hutchinson's latest provocative intervention, The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized, can be found in the opening lines of the book: Contemporary jurisprudence is based on a heist of spectacular proportions. Perpetrated over 175 years ago and carried on by subsequent generations of jurists, the general study of law has been hijacked by a strictly jurisprudential approach. 2 For Hutchinson, analytical jurisprudence, in all its variants, has committed and perpetuated one original sin, the denial and obfuscation of law's fundamentally social and political essence. The tradition of Anglo-American legal theory is deeply implicated in a process of masking the true nature of law, for Hutchinson, a contingent, and messy, political process, beneath the pretence that law is neutral and apolitical, that law is law. Grounded in a similar jurisprudential position, judicial review then concretizes the theoretical miasma of legal theory by applying`law' in situations which are at their core, political, social, and economic. Hutchinson does not so much advocate the notion of the counter-majoritarian difficulty most often associated with critiques of judicial review as undemocratic as attack legal reasoning itself as undemocratic. As detailed throughout The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized, both legal theory and legal practice serve to obfuscate the political nature of social existence. Hutchinson spares no one in his spirited, and insightful, attack on the fundamental self-denial of legal thinking. From John Austin, to Herbert Hart, and thence to Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, Jules Coleman, Jeremy Waldron, and Brian Leiter, among others, Hutchinson cuts a bloody, but often humorous, swathe through the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence, laying waste centuries of legal philosophy as he demonstrates the fundamental error of any pretence that`law' has an essence or a core which can be found outside of politics, sociology, or economics. The self-satisfied,

Polarcauste: law, justice and the Shoah in French detective fiction

International Journal of Law in Context, 2006

The Holocaust sits uncomfortably within general theories of representation. Moreover, the Shoah a... more The Holocaust sits uncomfortably within general theories of representation. Moreover, the Shoah also raises fundamental problems for our understandings of law and justice within modernity. ‘After Auschwitz’ serves as both a temporal and epistemological signifier within and about law and justice within modernity. This article studies the ways in which a new literary genre of French detective fiction, the néo-polar, which emerged after events of May 1968, has posited new understandings of law, justice and memory of the Shoah. Drawing on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and deconstruction, the article argues that the new generation of French writers problematise law, justice and politics through a genre in which ‘fiction’ writes and re-writes history and memory in a search for an impossible justice.

Daviborshch's Cart: Narrating the Holocaust in Australian War Crimes Trials. By David Fraser. Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press. 2010. Pp. xv + 371. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-0-8032-3412-3

Central European History, 2012

interesting, insightful contribution, and several chapters stand out as particularly original and... more interesting, insightful contribution, and several chapters stand out as particularly original and illuminating. Frank Biess's methodological chapter on the potential of the history of emotions, already mentioned above, is one such contribution. Another is Paul Betts's comparative reading of East and West German etiquette books as windows on competing attempts to rebuild civil society in Cold-War Germany. Lisa Kirschenbaum offers a fascinating analysis of the commemoration of the siege of Leningrad in the Soviet Union, in which she stresses the mutually reinforcing interaction of public and private memories, thereby challenging oftrepeated claims about the inherent conflict between deliberately distorted official memories and authentic private memories. Katherine Lebow, in turn, analyzes postwar reconstruction efforts in Poland, identifying the war and its immense destructiveness as a catalyst that helped to pave the way for the emergence of new definitions of moral economy and citizenship under post-1945 socialist rule. The list of outstanding contributions could go on, but space does not allow an exhaustive discussion here. A single volume obviously cannot do full justice to such a vast topic as the legacies of World War II in Europe, and Histories of the Aftermath is deliberately selective in its coverage. It does not address the experiences of countries that remained neutral during the war, for example, and its primary geographical emphasis on Germany and the Soviet Union-although useful in maintaining a tight analytical focus-means that other regions receive little or no attention. The different contributions also vary in just how transnational and comparative they are; while some chapters make a very serious attempt to provide broader comparative insights, others remain focused on particular national contexts. All in all, however, this is an ambitious, clearly conceived and ultimately highly useful volume that I hope will inspire further fruitful research into the European postwar. PERTTI AHONEN UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction: The Madonna Question, Sex and the House of Lords

Australasian Gay & Lesbian LJ, 1993

... here 2E a vaguely misogynist view of the powers of female sexuality, a cast of three critical... more

(De)constructing the Nazi state: criminal organizations and the constitutional theory of the international military tribunal

Loyola of Los Angeles international and comparative law review, 2017

A Passive Collaboration: Bureaucracy, Legality, and the Jews of Brussels 1940-1944

Brooklyn journal of international law, 2005

eading historian Jean-Philippe Schreiber argues that there are still remarkable lacunae in the hi... more eading historian Jean-Philippe Schreiber argues that there are still remarkable lacunae in the history of the Holocaust in Belgium. He writes that “[o]ne of the issues still to be thoroughly investigated for Belgium is the relations between Jews and non-Jews under the Occupation.” The role played by local Belgian administrations and elected officials in implementing the initial German measures against the Jews of Belgium is one area in which study has only just begun.

Cites for Sore Ears (A Paper Moon)

Dalhousie LJ, 1993

Music, as we know, is one of our vital cultural practices. It "has charms to soothe a savage brea... more Music, as we know, is one of our vital cultural practices. It "has charms to soothe a savage breast" ' and is "the food of love." ' 2 Someone who does not love music is not to be trusted 3 but someone "who has music in his [sic] soul will be most in love with the loveliest." 4 Music and one's attitude towards it tell us a lot about the ethical and moral value of a person. Law, another key part of our culture, has traditionally dealt with music mainly as something which might fall within the domain of copyright 5 or some related field of property. 6 More recently, however, legal discourse in Canada has taken a much broader approach to the connections between

Honorary Protestants: The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867–1997 by David FraserDavid Fraser. Honorary Protestants: The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867–1997. University of Toronto Press. x, 526. $85.00

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2017

David Fraser's Honorary Protestants is an impeccably researched history of the tensions, contexts... more David Fraser's Honorary Protestants is an impeccably researched history of the tensions, contexts, and meanings of the struggles to delineate how, in what manner, and with which accommodations Jewish children were schooled in the Montreal public school system. It is a welcome addition to the fields of Canadian legal history, modern Jewish history, Quebec history, and the history of education in Quebec. The book details the legal cases and political jockeying of Quebec's Jews to gain equal access to public education without effacing their religious difference, a saga that was shaped by the disagreements among and between Jews themselves, Protestants, Catholics, and representatives of state at the district, municipal, provincial, and constitutional levels. Though Jews gained legal emancipation in Quebec in 1832, Confederation's section 93 enshrined religious protections in education for the Protestant minority in Quebec and the Catholic minority in Ontarioand no others. ''The very structures of Canadian federalism,'' writes Fraser, ''were an ideological and intellectual barrier to rights more broadly construed.'' The constitutional amendment that guaranteed the rights of public education to all religious minorities in Quebec, effectively abrogating longlooming section 93, was passed only in 1997. Fraser's thick description and careful analysis demonstrates that Jews lobbied and litigated for full inclusion based on rights as citizens under common law, and tried to manoeuvre around the constitutionally enshrined religious rights that did not include them. They were slow to success. Anglophone Protestants and Francophone Catholics tended to defend their protections under section 93 and the ''ominous shadow'' it cast over the entire Jewish school question. Anti-Semitism played its part, as Jewish advocacy effectively challenged the de facto Christian hegemony of Quebec. Fraser shows that, despite legal hurdles to equality, the negotiations between internally divided communities and authorial parties usually resulted in manageable, if not altogether satisfying, agreements for reasonable and continued access to public schooling for Jewish children. Honorary Protestants details these working consensuses in the ''shadow humanities 145

This Is Not Like Any Other Legal Question: A Brief History of Nazi Law before British and American Courts

In the forty-five years since the appearance of the Hart/Fuller debate in the pages of the Harvar... more In the forty-five years since the appearance of the Hart/Fuller debate in the pages of the Harvard Law Review, the question of the correct classification of "Nazi law" has been at the centre of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The idea of "Nazi law" as "not law", derived from the work and intellectual biography of the German legal theorist 2 Gustav Radbruch, appears to be the dominant view today. This article places these theoretical debates into the concrete historical context of decided cases in which courts in Britain and America were faced with the practical question of what effect, if any, to give to so-called "Nazi laws". I argue that courts operating in the Anglo-American tradition have always reflected the tensions between natural law and positivism and that any simple characterization of "Nazi law" as "not law" is not tenable.

Law after Auschwitz: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Holocaust, David Fraser (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), xi + 451 pp., cloth, $48.00

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2007

... Law after Auschwitz: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Holocaust, David Fraser (Durham, NC: Caro... more

Thinking through the body of the law

Thinking Through the Body of the Law (1996) is a pathbreaking book which should presage further w... more Thinking Through the Body of the Law (1996) is a pathbreaking book which should presage further works of its kind. While the essays are more diverse than coherent, there is a general attempt to supplement Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Jurisprudence and Critical Race Theories' re-conceptualisation of the Law as something other than an isolated practice of objective and impartial rules. The authors question our understanding of ethics, embodiment, the social and law/justice. In doing so they present us with an inspiring range of trajectories which call for further research. In this respect, the title of the book sets an overly ambitious agenda. The title performatively asserts that the 'thinking' that is done in this book accomplishes a 'thinking through the body of the law.' This presumes a movement involving destination and arrival; parameters which seem both an impossibility and an undesirability given the subject. To reconceptualise ethics, embodiment and law-justice, as Patton attests in the book, requires us to find 'new fonns' (p.59) that will not be known in advance of the process nor be final in their 'specific detenninations.' (p.59

Jews or Germans? Nationality Legislation and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy in Western Europe after the Holocaust

Law and History Review, 2013

Statelessness continues to trouble today's international legal and political spheres. Despite... more Statelessness continues to trouble today's international legal and political spheres. Despite the International Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, the stateless remain an unwelcome presence and awkward anomaly within an international human rights regime still fundamentally dominated by the nation state structure. In 1945, Marc Vishniak wrote that the stateless were “… restricted in their rights more than any other people and constitute the weakest chain in the link of human rights.” Hannah Arendt, who was herself a Jewish refugee from Germany, placed the enigma of the stateless in an even more central philosophical position. Whereas Visniak emphasized the problematic and marginalized legal status of the stateless within the dominant international paradigm, Arendt proposed a re-imagining of the international legal order, a vision that would prioritize a solution to the situation of the stateless, especially stateless Jews, by “somehow or other restoring to th...

The Extraterritorial Application of the Nuremberg Laws. <I>Rassenschande</I> and “Mixed” Marriages in European Liberal Democracies

by David Fraser and Frank Caestecker

Journal of the History of International Law, 2008

2017) (DE)CONSTRUCTING THE NAZI STATE: CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL

European Society for Comparative Legal History Conference: "Culture, Identity and Legal Instrumentalism"

by Arno Dal Ri Jr., Diego Nunes, Cristiano Paixão, Anna Klimaszewska, David Fraser, and Tomasz Scheffler

University of Gdańsk-Gdynia, Poland, June 29th - July 1, 2016

How to write (how not to write) a thesis in comparative legal history: methodological challenges ... more

States of exception: Law, History, Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020) TABLE OF CONTENTS

by Cosmin Sebastian Cercel, Gian-Giacomo Fusco, Simon Lavis, Ceylan Begüm Yıldız, Przemyslaw Tacik, Dimitrios Kivotidis, and David Fraser

This is the table of contents of the forthcoming edited volume States of exception: Law, History,... more

Review Fraser on Berger

Canadian Jewish Studies, 2021

A review of Benjamin Berger's book on law and religion

Book Review Douglas Morris Modern Law Review 2021

Modern Law Review, 2021

A review of Morris' book on Ernst Fraenkel