Book review: the remnants of the Rechtsstaat: an ethnography of Nazi law by Jens Meierhenrich

In The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law, Jens Meierhenrich challenges the perception of Nazism as an absence or perversion of legal oversight, instead outlining how jurists and practitioners mobilised and transformed key concepts within German law to support the actions of the Nazi regime. Focusing particularly on the figure of Ernst Fraenkel and his formative work The Dual State – a critical ethnography of negotiating and challenging the changing terrain of law under Nazism – this is a valuable conceptual history of the German Rechtsstaat and a testament to the courage of its guardians in the 1930s, finds Joshua Smeltzer.