Jens Meierhenrich
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 221215 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jens Meierhenrich |
| NOMBRES | Jens |
| APELLIDO | Meierhenrich |
| FIRMA | MEIERHENRICH J |
| AFILIACIONES | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 57 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 73 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 23 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 34 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice
The Cambridge Handbook on the Material Constitution
Despite a long and venerable tradition, the material constitution almost disappeared from constitutional scholarship after the Second World War. Its marginalisation saw the rise of a normative and legalistic style in constitutional law that neglected the role of social reality and political economy. This collection not only retrieves the history and development of the concept of the material constitution, but it tests its theoretical and practica…
Toward a Sociology of International Law
Socio-legal scholars these days devote themselves routinely to the study of international law. It was not always thus. In the late twentieth century, no more than a handful of law-and-society scholars asked themselves how international law worked. Even fewer ventured into the field. John Hagan was one of those who did and the first sociologist to study empirically—and rigorously—what we now call international criminal law. In this article, I use …
The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law
The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law introduces students, scholars, and practitioners to the theory and history of the rule of law, one of the most frequently invoked-and least understood-ideas of legal and political thought and policy practice. It offers a comprehensive re-assessment by leading scholars of one of the world's most cherished traditions. This high-profile collection provides the first global and interdisciplinary account of t…
Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law
Constitutional Dictatorships, from Colonialism to Covid-19
In this article, I use the concept of constitutional dictatorship as a heuristic, as a way of thinking more explicitly about constitutional violence than is customary in comparative constitutional law. Constitutional dictatorship is an epic concept. It is capable of illuminating—and retelling—epic histories of constitutional law, of alerting us to commonalities in constitutional practices of domination—and thus of violence—that would otherwise re…
How Many Victims Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? A Statistical Debate
One of the thorniest methodological challenges in the study of genocide is counting the dead. In his important account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Mahmood Mamdani wondered whether its dead coul
The Force of Law
If Frederick Schauer, the distinguished philosopher of law, is correct, ‘a new conventional wisdom’ has waylaid the study of law: the assumption ‘that force is not the characteristic or identifying feature of law’.1 Relegating the coercive aspect of law to the sidelines of theoretical interest, according to Schauer, is perverse. Relegating the coercive aspect of law to the sidelines of historical interest would be equally problematic. As luck has…
The Debate about the Rechtsstaat in Nazi Germany, 1933–1936
This chapter provides the legal and historical context necessary for appreciating the contribution of Fraenkel’s ethnography of Nazi law. I begin with a brief history of the idea of the Rechtsstaat in Germany. I trace the term’s evolution from its emergence in the early nineteenth century until 1933. In the second section I overview the most important Nazi critiques of the liberal Rechtsstaat , with a particular focus on the theoretical study of …
The Decline of a Classic
This chapter explores the uneven reception of Fraenkel’s classic across space and time, with particular reference to the book’s very different fortunes in the United States and postwar Germany. I account in detail for the international recognition bestowed on Fraenkel in the early 1940s, and its subsequent status as an obligatory footnote—a marginalized classic that few had read and even fewer understood. I also explain why The Dual State failed …
An Ethnography of Nazi Law
This chapter turns to the gestation of the first, German-language manuscript of The Dual State , known as the Urdoppelstaat of 1938. I then chart the transformation of this unpublished manuscript into the 1941 book. To lay the foundation for this detailed reconstruction, I trace in some depth the gradual destruction of the German Rechtsstaat , presenting in an accessible manner several decades worth of material culled from the historiography of N…
The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat
This book provides an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel’s classic The Dual State (1941), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel’s was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National Socialism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler’s Germany. His sophisticated––not to mention courageous––analysis amounted to an ethnography of Nazi law. Because of its clandestine o…
Political Trials in Theory and History
The Dual State
This text, first published in 1941, provides a comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National-Socialism, and is the only such analysis written from within Hitler’s Germany. Its central thesis is that two states co-existed in National-Socialist Germany—hence, Fraenkel’s invention of the concept of the dual state. This was comprised of a normative state (which protected the legal order as expressed in legislation, decisions of the courts…
A Jurist Confronting Himself
This chapter was originally published as a preface to a collection of Italian translations of texts by and interviews with Carl Schmitt. It shows how each text offers an image of Schmitt that can best be seen in light of what Walter Benjamin called the "now of knowability": in a constellation formed by the decisive political problems of Schmitt’s time. The challenge these texts thus propose is akin to that of finding figures hidden in a landscape…
“A Fanatic of Order in an Epoch of Confusing Turmoil”
This handbook engages with the critical ordering of Schmitt’s writings, investing in the proper contextualization of his polycentric thought. More important than whether Schmitt’s positions and concepts are relevant in the twenty-first century is how to read Schmitt so as to grasp the original meanings of his many publications. The handbook intends to provoke debate about the relevance of his canon for thinking about the present. It argues that t…
Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Rhetoric
By the end of the 1930s space (Raum) had become a common catchword in the writings of Carl Schmitt. This chapter argues that space was not merely a theme during this phase of his career, but was linked to a rhetorical strategy and mode of argumentation. Focusing on Land and Sea (1942) and “Nomos” of the Earth (1950), the first two sections show how Schmitt developed two contrasting modes of argumentation inextricably intertwined with his theory o…
Fearing the Disorder of Things
This chapter offers a longitudinal analysis of Carl Schmitt’s institutional theory. It provides a detailed road map for the period under investigation, examining critical junctures and theoretical turns along the way. Two principal arguments are advanced. First, the chapter departs from conventional analyses according to which Schmitt only embarked on an “institutional turn” in the early 1930s. Instead of conceiving of Schmitt’s institutionalism …
Same/Other versus Friend/Enemy
This chapter endeavors to show that the relevant contrasting term to friend in liberal political theory is not enemy but self. Given the skepticism that suffuses liberal theory, the self remains an endlessly problematic construct that gives us ongoing opportunities for reimagining and reconstructing what the behavior of both friends and enemies is truly like. The chapter examines key terms in the liberal epistemological vocabulary such as skeptic…
Carl Schmitt in Plettenberg
This chapter focuses on Carl Schmitt’s years in post–World War II Germany. After being released from the Nuremberg prison for war criminals, Schmitt returned to his birthplace, Plettenberg, and named his house “San Casciano,” invoking a village in Tuscany where Machiavelli spent his final years. Like Schmitt, Machiavelli too was deprived of public office, in the Florentine city-state. While other intellectuals who had sympathized with the Nazis—M…
At the Limits of Rhetoric
This chapter analyzes the systematic relationship of Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre to rhetoric, arguing that his work cannot be detached from its engagement in a simultaneously metaphysical and historical polemic. The encounter between history and metaphysics manifests in the dimension of the commonplace. Schmitt’s contributions to political theory can be understood as attempts to shift the commonplaces through which his time defines itself. Tracing the …
Carl Schmitt and International Law
Carl Schmitt always presented himself and was above all a jurist. His doctoral dissertation was based on an antiformal theory of law that was also in evidence in his acerbic critics of the League of Nations and the system of control over Germany established in the Treaty of Versailles. This chapter shows that the concrete-order thinking of his later years espoused a more conventional legal realism that has always constituted an important stream o…
Carl Schmitt and Modernity
Carl Schmitt’s political and juridical thought is anchored in a specific diagnosis of modernity. He develops the concept of the political because of how the location and address of the political become fundamentally questionable under modern conditions. Romanticism disempowers the state, the government, indeed all political-public structures and processes, turning them into mere “scenery” or simulacrums that hide an actual or substantial reality.…
Walter Benjamin’s Esteem for Carl Schmitt
This chapter shows why Carl Schmitt’s philosophical theories retained their fascination and conceptual force for young intellectuals in postwar Germany. Publication of a letter Walter Benjamin had written to Schmitt in 1930, which revealed his esteem for Schmitt, was a catalyst for philosophers such as Jacob Taubes, who had distanced himself from Schmitt. Taubes’s research into the two men’s relationship helped to overcome the postwar constructio…
A “Catholic Layman of German Nationality and Citizenship”?
Carl Schmitt positioned his constitutional theory in the context of a “political theology” and referred to himself repeatedly as a Catholic. Schmitt scholarship has long pursued this self-depiction without establishing a convincing “Catholic” doctrine, political position, or life praxis. This chapter provides an overview and critical interrogation of Schmitt’s self-description. By emphasizing his political and theological distance from his early …
The Structure of Online Activism
Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how "active" is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members of the Save Darfur "Cause" on Facebook to provide a detailed first look at a massive online social mo…
Establishing collective norms
In June 2002, the Republic of Rwanda embarked on an extraordinary experiment in transitional justice, inaugurating the pilot phase of a new participatory justice system called Inkiko-Gacaca. This article-the result of 8 weeks of research involving interviews with government and nongovernmental organization officials, local judges, and prisoners, and extensive observations of the Inkiko-Gacaca process in several different rural communities-explore…
Varieties of Reconciliation
In recent years scholars from neighboring disciplines have emphasized the importance of conceptual rigor in designing, administering, and interpreting research in the social sciences. Drawing on this new conceptualism, this article analyzes the much talked about notion of “reconciliation.” In an effort at structuring a useful debate on possible departures from historic injustice, the article formulates a systematized concept of reconciliation bas…
How Do States Join the International Criminal Court
Against the background of Japan's long-anticipated implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2007, this article analyses the legislative implications of treaty accession. One of the causes of the accession delay in Japan — nearly 10 years passed between the government's participation in the adoption of the Rome Statute and its implementation thereof — was the challenge of aligning the conflicting imperatives of dom…
Presidential and parliamentary elections in Rwanda, 2003
The transformation of lieux de mémoire
This article takes the Nyabarongo river as a lens through which to tentatively reflect on the transformation of lieux de memoire in post-genocide Rwanda in the period 1992-2009. It is culled from a larger, multi-year project on the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective memory in Rwanda that revolves around a systematic, historical, and spatial analysis of the hundreds of genocide memorials, informal and otherwise, that ha…
The Ethics of Lustration
One of the most important challenges for the occupation of Iraq has been making decisions about the status of people who were either responsible for or who passively benefited from the regime's past injustices. But how should such people—in this case, members of the Baath Party—be dealt with? And how have they been dealt with under the U.S. occupation? Although lustration is just one of many institutions of jus post bellum , it is arguably one of…
Constitutional Dictatorships, from Colonialism to Covid-19
In this article, I use the concept of constitutional dictatorship as a heuristic, as a way of thinking more explicitly about constitutional violence than is customary in comparative constitutional law. Constitutional dictatorship is an epic concept. It is capable of illuminating—and retelling—epic histories of constitutional law, of alerting us to commonalities in constitutional practices of domination—and thus of violence—that would otherwise re…
Conspiracy in International Law
This review examines the function of conspiracy in international law, with particular reference to the jurisprudence of international ad hoc tribunals. It compares and contrasts the function of conspiracy law in the prosecution of international crimes before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg following World War II, where the concept gave rise to a remarkably innovative and highly controversial conspiracy theory that revolved …
How Many Victims Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? A Statistical Debate
One of the thorniest methodological challenges in the study of genocide is counting the dead. In his important account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Mahmood Mamdani wondered whether its dead coul
Toward a Sociology of International Law
Socio-legal scholars these days devote themselves routinely to the study of international law. It was not always thus. In the late twentieth century, no more than a handful of law-and-society scholars asked themselves how international law worked. Even fewer ventured into the field. John Hagan was one of those who did and the first sociologist to study empirically—and rigorously—what we now call international criminal law. In this article, I use …
Establishing collective norms
In June 2002, the Republic of Rwanda embarked on an extraordinary experiment in transitional justice, inaugurating the pilot phase of a new participatory justice system called Inkiko-Gacaca. This article-the result of 8 weeks of research involving interviews with government and nongovernmental organization officials, local judges, and prisoners, and extensive observations of the Inkiko-Gacaca process in several different rural communities-explore…
Conspiracy in International Law
This review examines the function of conspiracy in international law, with particular reference to the jurisprudence of international ad hoc tribunals. It compares and contrasts the function of conspiracy law in the prosecution of international crimes before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg following World War II, where the concept gave rise to a remarkably innovative and highly controversial conspiracy theory that revolved …
The Ethics of Lustration
One of the most important challenges for the occupation of Iraq has been making decisions about the status of people who were either responsible for or who passively benefited from the regime's past injustices. But how should such people—in this case, members of the Baath Party—be dealt with? And how have they been dealt with under the U.S. occupation? Although lustration is just one of many institutions of jus post bellum , it is arguably one of…
Presidential and parliamentary elections in Rwanda, 2003
The trauma of genocide
The Legacies of Law
Focusing on South Africa during the period 1650–2000, this book examines the role of law in making democracy work in changing societies. The Legacies of Law sheds light on the neglected relationship between path dependence and the law. Meierhenrich argues that legal norms and institutions, even illiberal ones, have an important - and hitherto undertheorized - structuring effect on democratic outcomes. Under certain conditions, law appears to redu…
The foundations of constitutionalism
Varieties of Reconciliation
In recent years scholars from neighboring disciplines have emphasized the importance of conceptual rigor in designing, administering, and interpreting research in the social sciences. Drawing on this new conceptualism, this article analyzes the much talked about notion of “reconciliation.” In an effort at structuring a useful debate on possible departures from historic injustice, the article formulates a systematized concept of reconciliation bas…
Entries
How Do States Join the International Criminal Court
Against the background of Japan's long-anticipated implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2007, this article analyses the legislative implications of treaty accession. One of the causes of the accession delay in Japan — nearly 10 years passed between the government's participation in the adoption of the Rome Statute and its implementation thereof — was the challenge of aligning the conflicting imperatives of dom…
The transformation of lieux de mémoire
This article takes the Nyabarongo river as a lens through which to tentatively reflect on the transformation of lieux de memoire in post-genocide Rwanda in the period 1992-2009. It is culled from a larger, multi-year project on the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective memory in Rwanda that revolves around a systematic, historical, and spatial analysis of the hundreds of genocide memorials, informal and otherwise, that ha…
Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship
This chapter reconstructs the intellectual-historical background to Carl Schmitt’s well-known analysis of the problem of dictatorship and the powers of the Reichspräsident under the Weimar Constitution. The analysis focuses both on Schmitt’s wartime propaganda work, concerning a distinction between the state of siege and dictatorship, as well as on his more general analysis of modern German liberalism. It demonstrates why Schmitt attempted to pro…
The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt
This chapter provides a detailed introduction to the thought of Carl Schmitt that incorporates insights from law, the social sciences, and the humanities. It is also an intervention in its own right, seeking to decenter the study of this most hyped thinker of the twentieth century by advancing two interconnected arguments. First, we argue that the motif of order is a powerful yet insufficiently utilized heuristic device for making sense of Schmit…
A “Catholic Layman of German Nationality and Citizenship”?
Carl Schmitt positioned his constitutional theory in the context of a “political theology” and referred to himself repeatedly as a Catholic. Schmitt scholarship has long pursued this self-depiction without establishing a convincing “Catholic” doctrine, political position, or life praxis. This chapter provides an overview and critical interrogation of Schmitt’s self-description. By emphasizing his political and theological distance from his early …
Is “the Political” a Romantic Concept?
This chapter analyzes Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political from the vantage point of German Romanticism. For Schmitt, Romanticism wasan intellectual attitude that precluded the concept and practice of “the political.” Through an in-depth reading of a preeminent document of political thought in German Romanticism, Novalis’s Love and Faith, this chapter considers and qualifies this view, arguing that “political theology” can be understood as a r…
Carl Schmitt’s Defense of Democracy
Carl Schmitt accommodated himself to the ascendency of democratic thinking in the post–World War I world of the 1920s. No sovereign authority, he argued, could fail to acknowledge “the people” as the constituent power of an established political order. Consequently, democracy and “the political” become synonymous in his Constitutional Theory (1928). To champion democracy, however, Schmitt emphasized the historical distinction between democracy, b…
Carl Schmitt’s Concept of History
In many of his political writings, Carl Schmitt seeks to render conflict and struggle visible and recognizable. He wages a metapolitical struggle against depoliticizing types of spirit and for the political. The meaning of history, as this chapter shows, is a crucial terrain for this metapolitical struggle: friends and enemies are symbolized and rendered (in)visible through historical discourses. The analysis demonstrates that Schmitt strongly re…
Carl Schmitt’s Concepts of War
Carl Schmitt’s conceptual history of war is routinely invoked to comprehend the contemporary mutations in the concept and practice of war. This literature has passively relied on Schmitt’s interpretation of the nomos of the Ius Publicum Europaeum, which traced the transition from early modern ‘non-discriminatory war’ to the US–American promotion of discriminatory warfare as a new category in liberal international law . This chapter provides a cri…
What’s “Left” in Schmitt?
Since the mid-1980s, the Western Left has split on how to evaluate the political and constitutional theory of Carl Schmitt. The analysis traces and historicizes a movement from aversion to appropriation of Schmitt’s writings in contemporary political theory. In the first half of the chapter Habermas is presented as developing his own positions in part through deep engagements with Schmitt’s thought. In the second half of the chapter, three contem…
Schmitt’s Diaries
Written between 1912 and 1979, Carl Schmitt’s diaries (published and unpublished) rank among the most illuminating documentary sources of the era. This chapter argues that the published diaries have significantly transformed perceptions of his personality, motivations, and sentiments as well as of his thoughts on crucial intellectual and political questions related to 20th century Germany. Drawing extensively on these primary sources, the chapter…
Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt
This chapter traces the intellectual relationship between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. It is well known that the two legal thinkers had sharply contrasting views on sovereignty, democracy, and the role of unity in the law and in politics. Less well known is Schmitt’s proximity, in his very early work, to Kelsen on certain issues, such as the “is”-“ought” distinction and “points of imputation.” This proximity was short-lived, and the discord betw…
Concepts of the Political in Twentieth-Century European Thought
This chapter surveys the fate of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political in twentieth-century European thought. It starts with the main outlines of his founding text The Concept of the Political, with emphasis on conceptual ambiguities in Schmitt’s argumentation that others would identify and exploit. It then turns to a recent debate about which young German Jew—Hans Morgenthau or Leo Strauss—most influenced the revisions Schmitt made to his text…
Teaching in Vain
This chapter traces Carl Schmitt’s attempt, in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, to quell the near civil war circumstances of the late Weimar Republic and to reinvigorate the sovereignty of the German state through a reappropriation of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy. The chapter then examines Schmitt’s reconsideration of the Hobbesian state, and his own recent reformulation of it, in light of the rise of the “Third Reich,” with pa…
Politonomy
This chapter situates Schmitt as a jurist and specifically as a scholar occupying a distinctive position within German state theory. Schmitt’s overall objective was to build a theory of the constitution of political authority from the most basic elements of the subject, and in this respect he sought to make a contribution to the discipline of politonomy. A concept first alluded to by Schmitt but one he never developed, politonomy concerns the inq…
The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt once defined himself as a theologian of jurisprudence. This chapter argues that his concept of political theology must be understood within the context of jurisprudence and not as a thesis concerning the use of religion within politics. In its earlier configuration, Schmitt’s political theology is a multifaceted response to two juridical critiques of sovereignty: those of Hans Kelsen; and those of Otto von Gierke and the English plur…
Political science (54 obras) · Law (52 obras) · Politics (40 obras) · Philosophy (37 obras) · Sociology (37 obras) · Political Theology and Sovereignty (32 obras) · Epistemology (25 obras) · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought (22 obras) · History (16 obras) · Political philosophy (12 obras)