View article

For almost half a century, jurisprudence both here and abroad has struggled to digest the horrors of the Holocaust.'Legal theory's attempt to come to grips with the Holocaust has come in two stages. The attack on legal positivism's distinction between" law as it is" and" law as it ought to be" dominated the first stage during the decade or so after World War II. Emerging from his internal exile2 in 1945, Gustav Radbruch, perhaps the most influential German legal philosopher in this century, spent the remaining years before his death in 1949 renouncing positivism and calling for the recognition of law beyond positive statutory law (zibergesetzliches Recht). 3 In the first decade or so after