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293A ‘Most Astonishing’ Circumstance: The Survival of Jewish POWs in German War Captivity During the Second World WarSocial and Legal Studies 30 (3): 362-383. 2021.During the Second World War, more than 60,000 Jewish members of the American, British and French armed forces became prisoners of war in Germany. Against all expectations, these prisoners were treated in accordance with the 1929 Geneva Convention, and the majority made it home alive. This article seeks to explain this most astonishing circumstance. It begins by collating the references to the experiences of Western Jewish POWs from the historical literature to provide a hitherto-unseen overview …Read more
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582Property and the Interests of Things: The Case of the Donative TrustLaw and Critique 30 (2): 201-220. 2019.Within a liberal, ‘law of things’ understanding of property, the donative trust is seen as a species of gift. Control over trust property passes from the hands of settlors to beneficiaries, from owners to owners. Trust property, like all other property, is silent and passive, its fate determined by its owners. This article questions this understanding of the trust by showing how beneath the facade of ownership, the trust inverts the relation between owner and owned, person and thing. It analyses…Read more
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337From Nomos to Hegung: Sovereignty and the Laws of War in Schmitt’s International OrderThe Modern Law Review 78 (3): 411-430. 2015.Carl Schmitt's notion of nomos is commonly regarded as the international equivalent to the national sovereign's decision on the exception. But can concrete spatial order alone turn a constellation of forces into an international order? This article looks at Schmitt's work The Nomos of the Earth and proposes that it is the process of bracketing war called Hegung which takes the place of the sovereign in the international order Schmitt describes. Beginning from an analysis of nomos, the ordering f…Read more
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411Where Nothing Happened: The Experience of War Captivity and Levinas’s Concept of the ‘There Is’Social and Legal Studies 26 (2): 230-248. 2017.This article takes as its subject matter the juridico-political space of the prisoner of war (POW) camp. It sets out to determine the nature of this space by looking at the experience of war captivity by Jewish members of the Western forces in World War II, focusing on the experience of Emmanuel Levinas, who spent 5 years in German war captivity. On the basis of a historical analysis of the conditions in which Levinas spent his time in captivity, it argues that the POW camp was a space of indiff…Read more
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239Law, Decision, Necessity: Shifting the Burden of ResponsibilityIn Matilda Arvidsson, Leila Brännström & Panu Minkkinen (eds.), The Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt: Law, Politics, Theology, Routledge. pp. 107-119. 2015.What does it mean to act politically? This paper contributes an answer to this question by looking at the role that necessity plays in the political theory of Carl Schmitt. It argues that necessity, whether in the form of existential danger or absolute values, does not affect the sovereign decision, which must be free from normative determinations if it is to be a decision in Schmitt’s sense at all. The paper then provides a reading of Schmitt in line with Weber’s ethics of responsibility, accor…Read more
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Durham UniversityRegular Faculty
Durham, Durham, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Law |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |
20th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
European Philosophy |