(Source: HUP)
Harvard
University Press has published a new book on the legal transformation of
Occupied Japan and Germany.
ABOUT THE
BOOK
A legal
historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist
Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the
limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries.
Following
victory in World War II, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold
policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan: to achieve their
permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially
American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders
with liberal rule-of-law regimes.
In his
comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal
historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to
initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the
process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of
fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in
generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions.
Drawing on
rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were
impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring
deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other.
Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy
weakened U.S. credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied
Germany and Japan.
In Laying
Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an
ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system,
making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
R. W.
Kostal is Professor in the Faculty of Law at Western University, Ontario, and
author of Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1875, and A Jurisprudence of
Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Introduction:
Laying Down the Law in Occupied Germany and Japan
1. The
“Destruction of Philosophies”: Planning the Legal Reconstruction of Germany and
Japan
2.
Occupying the Legal Other: The Subjugation of the German and Japanese Legal
Systems
3. Captive
Constitutions: Remaking Constitutional Law in Occupied Germany and Japan
4. Crafting
Liberal Courts: Reconstituting the German and Japanese Judiciaries
5. Clearing
the Spiritual Rubble: Reforming Criminal Justice in Occupied Germany and Japan
6. Twilight
of the Gods: The Rise and Fall of Civil Liberties in Occupied Germany and Japan
Conclusion:
Laying Down the Law: Americans as Legal Revolutionaries
Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
More
information here
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