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Legal Positivism Analysis

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INTRODUCTION The trial and sentencing of Adolf Eichmann, stands to be one of the most prolific trials post the Nuremberg trials. Adolf Eichmann, the SS Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lt. Colonel) headed the RSHA Section IV B4, the Race and Settlement Office of the Nazi government, which administered the extermination of European Jewry. It is against this backdrop that this paper seeks to analyze some of the legal intricacies of the Eichmann trial in the context of natural and positivist legal theories in a bid to resolve the following questions: Firstly, whether an immoral law or unjust law is really law and whether the same should be obeyed; and secondly, whether in the view of Adolf Eichmann’s defence of him merely following lawful orders, should …show more content…

Legal positivism is thus distinguished by two central claims: that law is separable from its substantive morality and that there is no necessary link between law and morality. Thus, both Hart and Austin propound that the existence of a law and our duty to obey such law, even if we dislike it are two different queries. It is often argued that legal positivism assisted in legitimizing the Nazi rule. According to Hart’s Rule of Recognition, the master test of legal validity, there must not only exist both a convergent practice among officials of applying certain criteria of legal validity in deciding which norms are laws, but also that the officials adopt an “internal point of view” towards this practice, that is, they believe they have an obligation to do …show more content…

It is understood to describe a bureaucratic and a legal phenomenon. Organizationally removed from mass killing, superior officers sanctioned, functionaries such as Eichmann could claim to have participated in the Final Solution out of a feeling of obligation. Thus, Holocaust was viewed as the perfection, rather than as the perversion, of legal positivism-the idea that the legitimacy of a legal command derives from its status as law, and not from any underlying normative content. It shall be recalled that Eichmann viewed his behavior as law-abiding and therefore just. He felt “free of all guilt” secure in the knowledge that his superiors knew and approved of his actions as many of the officers of the

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On November 14, 1945, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials began in Germany. They were to be the definitive judgement of the crimes against humanity by the Nazis. In the midst of the trial, it was determined that the SS, along with its associated organizations such as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD--the security and intelligence organization within the SS) and Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo—State Secret Police), was a criminal organization.1 The verdict placed on the SS was as follows:

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“At that time we knew nothing about the Nazis' extermination methods.” (Wiesel 20). These quotes support the claim of the Holocaust being considered a form of genocide by stating the stages of genocide and the

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They state, “In Germany, many individuals who were not zealous Nazis nonetheless participated in varying degrees in the persecution and murder of Jews and other victims” (“How and Why Did Ordinary People Across Europe Contribute to the Persecution of their Jewish Neighbors?” 1). However, in the passage about SS officers and soldiers, the author explains that “SS men…established killing centers equipped with gas chambers to facilitate assembly line mass murder” (“Perpetrators” 5). Therefore, SS officers developed the places where Jews were killed and without them, the Holocaust would not have been so severe. Thus, SS officers were more responsible for the Holocaust than non-Jewish Europeans. Moreover, according to “How and Why Did Ordinary People Across Europe Contribute to the Persecution of their Jewish Neighbors?”, “They [German citizens] were aware of the risk that outspoken dissidents faced in a police state, where opponents of the regime could be arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps without trial” (12).

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Roosevelt and the Holocaust and Robert N. Rosen. Rosen is a lawyer who is an M.A. in history from Harvard. The purpose of this book is to undertake the task of defending Franklin D. Roosevelt, his direction to the Jewish community against charges of irrelevance to, and moral complicity in the German Holocaust. The values in Rosen’s work is that he also presents a convincing legal argument and organizes his evidence truthfully, while arguing vigorously. He delivers an unqualified judgement: far from being indifferent.

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Christopher Browning documents everyday experiences and tribulations of Germany men, who were involved in the tragic events of the Holocaust. Browning tries illustrate the reasoning of all the massacres caused by the Reserve Police Battalion 101, so that people could get a clear understanding of what really was going on with these men, physically and mentally. Looking past all the opposing claims of German men, Browning explains how these men were just regular “middle aged family men” who were taking basic orders from higher authorities (1). Throughout the book Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning explains his reasoning of calling these murders ordinary men, the reasoning behind all the massacres, and how these men later on became killers.

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I. Introduction The Holocaust is one of the most horrific and cruel genocides known to mankind. Adolf Eichmann is one of the many people who took a huge part in this genocide. He thought of ways to transport Jews to and from concentration camps, as well as ways to efficiently kill a great number of them. Eichmann's atrocious thought processes affects millions of lives.

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The destinies of several nazi individuals all throughout the last of World War II are spread wherever the guide regarding what transpired. Many took a sign from their devoted pioneer, Adolf Hitler, and submitted suicide to evade catch and discipline. These war hoodlums could never need to confront their violations. Others fled the nation and went up against expected characters in an attempt to escape experts. While a large portion of the individuals who fled were caught, there is entirely a main 10 most needed rundown of Holocaust war lawbreakers today.

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In “The Next Genocide,” Snyder begins with, “Before he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish child in the air and said, ‘You must die so that we can live.’ As the killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized the murder of Jewish children in the same way: them or us” (Snyder par. 1). The austere illustration of German soldiers massacring innocent Jewish children emphasizes the stark horror and terror of a twisted ideology in the readers’ minds. Such an emotional appeal strengthens Snyder’s argument that pointless bloodshed occurs whenever empiricism is disregarded in favor of fanaticism, creating desperate countries that are willing to commit genocide to sustain themselves. While the horrors of the Holocaust seem a distant memory, the greater terror is that those same factors are still viable reasons for alarm.

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The Holocaust is still a heavily reviewed subject and is debatably one of the worst if not the worst atrocity that has happened on this Planet up to date. To think that the Nazi’s were able to kill millions of people it has made us question what kind of people they were and if they were anything similar to us. It is hard to think of a perpetrator to be a normal human being. The Holocaust has made us question if the Nazi’s had any sense of moral sensibility when killing innocent and defenseless Jewish men and women. In the book Ordinary Men, Author Christopher Browning argues that these Nazi’s especially referring to the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were normal people who had instructions given by Hitler and their government to follow through with by devaluing all Jewish life.

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Many actions played out during the Holocaust and World War II were not humane, and still remind us like a scream behind closed doors: hidden but still heard. While hearing the horrid stories and seeing the ghoulish photos of times not to be forgotten, we see the tragedy that is the mistreatment of human lives. Our identities are lost little by little, but those victims had theirs ripped from their bodies. After losing everything and then becoming a nearly empty vessel, it is amazing that we attempt to comprehend the cruelty of the Holocaust. The loss of identity and self might have started with Adolf Hitler’s reign, for the Holocaust legacies, but we are all losing bits of ourselves constantly.

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Also, known as Shoah, it witnessed the setting up of concentration camps and extermination camps in today’s Germany, Poland, Austria and Yugoslavia, where around 11 million people were killed based on their racial inferiority and many more enslaved and tortured. It was the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’( which was a well discussed topic for many years in Europe). Only 10 percent of Polish Jewry and one-third of all European Jews remained by the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. To today’s history students it would be surprising to know that an event as popular as the Holocaust was ignored by historians until the 1960s when the trial of notorious SS killer Eichmann and the publishing of Gerald Reitlinger’s important book The Final Solution’: the attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-45 created a lot of interest among the Western

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In his essay The Model of Rules I, Professor Ronald Dworkin argues against a certain theory of law he attributes to H.L.A Hart called “positivism.” While Dworkin argues against many tenets of the positivist theory, I will focus this essay on critical reasons against Dworkin’s argument against the legal positivist thesis that the law consist of nothing but rules. To do so, I will explain the necessary components of Hart’s theory of law required to understand Dworkin’s rebuttal. Then, I will reconstruct Dworkin’s argument against what I will classify “nothing but rules” claim, and I will ultimate claim Dworkin’s argument fails because his premise that states principles are extra-legal and cannot be explained as part of the categories is false. In particular, I indicate how principles can be legally binding like legal rules are, and I pick apart his reasons for believing that there are clear distinctions between laws and principles.

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Otto Adolf Eichmann was one of the most important members of the Nazi Party who was accused of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity during World War 2. After the war, he went to Argentina to escape prosecution but was captured there by Israeli agents and was transferred to Israel to be judged. During the trial, Eichmann’s defense was based on Kant’s duty-based ethical theory and categorical Imperative since he overstated many times that he was only following orders. By enouncing Kantian ethical theory, Eichmann acquitted himself from moral guilt. Kant’s categorical imperative as known as The Formula Of The End

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In hard cases, judges are not legislating, as Hart’s positivists assert, they are inducing based on principle. Judges have a duty not only to apply the rules, but also to make sure that the legal system is consistent with the principles of the society. When judges are said to legislate, they are not making the rules but discovering them. [20] According to Dworkin understanding the role of the courts is to defend the rights of citizens from the likelihood of unfair rules or other circumstances in which the written laws do not satisfactorily defend their natural rights.

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Positivist says that there is no obligation to follow a law morally. But in some cases for example (MURDER) it is good to obey law due to its moral content. Another place where it is good to follow law is to solve a coordination problem for example (driving on your right side). In most of the cases our own moral judgements helps us in deciding to obey law or not. The main issue here is how we should view the law morally, whether law in itself is generally a good thing?

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