Kristen Rundle

The Impossibility of an Exterminatory Legality: Law and the Holocaust

Discussions of Nazi law in legal philosophy are most commonly concerned with how the Nazis’ use of law as a means to persecute their opponents demonstrates the essential amorality of law. Attention is often also paid to the institutional debasements and interpretive excesses that characterized the operation of the Nazi political courts. Within these discussions, however, little or no consideration is given to the specificities of the Jewish experience of Nazi law, nor to the fact that the role of law in determining the nature and quality of Jewish life stopped short of the extermination program. In this article, the author seeks to correct this neglect by exploring the questions for legal philosophy, as well as for scholarship that probes the connections between law and the Holocaust, that arise from an examination of the Jewish experience of Nazi law. Drawing primarily upon the thought of the mid-twentieth-century legal philosopher Lon L. Fuller, the author investigates what the apparent shift from legality to terror within the Nazi persecution of the Jews might reveal not only about the institutional features of that persecutory program but also about the nature of legality more generally.

Legal Subjects and Juridical Persons: Developing Public Legal Theory through Fuller and Arendt

This special issue of NJLP is devoted to the notion of personhood or subjectivity in the context of public law. The main claim of our distinguished guest author Kristen Rundle, Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Australia, is that Hannah Arendt’s analysis of legal subjectivity provides new insights to Lon Fuller’s inquiry into law’s forms and their bearing on human agency. Moreover, the pairing of Arendt and Fuller, Rundle claims, provides the building blocks of an alternative theory of public law. Four philosophers have been invited to respond to Rundle’s exposition: Thomas Mertens (Radboud University Nijmegen), Wouter Veraart (Free University Amsterdam), Pauline Westerman (University of Groningen), and Michael Wilkinson (London School of Economics). Rundle and her critics wrote their contributions at the request of the Board of the Netherlands Association of Philosophy of Law (VWR) and presented them at the association’s Spring meeting, which was organized on June 20, 2014 in the conference center ‘De Veranda’ in Amsterdam.

Gardner on Fuller: A Response to ‘The Supposed Formality of the Rule of Law’

‘The Supposed Formality of the Rule of Law’, chapter 8 in John Gardner’s Law as Leap of Faith, sets out to explore key questions from the Fuller-Hart debate. I say the ‘Fuller-Hart debate’ as opposed to the more orthodox ‘Hart-Fuller debate’ because, as Gardner himself acknowledges, it was Fuller who brought questions about the ‘rule of law’ to the table when he chose to respond to Hart’s re-presentation of legal positivist philosophy in the 1958 Harvard Law Review. There is a genuine sense throughout the essay that Gardner wants to bring forth a much more subtle picture of the stakes of that famous exchange, from Fuller’s perspective. Bridge-building has not always been something that those sympathetic to Fuller’s jurisprudence can anticipate from legal positivists, so on that score alone we have much to thank Gardner for. The questions raised by ‘The Supposed Formality of the Rule of Law’ all connect to the issue that Gardner identifies as central to Fuller’s jurisprudential project but ultimately poorly explained by Fuller himself: namely, the matter of law’s formality. The questions for consideration in the essay thus go to what it means, and what it should mean, to say that this thing we call the ‘rule of law’ is ‘formal’ in character,

Improbable Agents of Empire: Coming to Terms with British Child Migration

Prompted by the occasion of Gordon Browns parliamentary apology to British child migrants in February 2010, Kristen Rundle reflects upon the experience of her grandfather who was sent to Australia as a child migrant in 1934. Integrating research from family records, government documents and her own background as a legal scholar, she explores the social and political architectures that facilitated the child migration scheme during her grandfathers time, and which constituted distinctive conditions of vulnerability from which some families of child migrants are yet to recover.