Empire of Law

Kaius Tuori is Professor of European Intellectual History at the Centre for European Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. He is a legal historian and author of two monographs and numerous articles spanning the topics of tradition, culture, identity, memory and the uses of the past.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Legal refugees from Nazi Germany and the idea of liberty; 3. Redefining the rule of law, jurisprudence and the totalitarian state; 4. The long legal tradition and the European heritage in Nazi Germany; 5. Reconfiguring European legal tradition after the war; 6. The European narrative and the tradition of rights; 7. Conclusions.

'Kaius Tuori convincingly demonstrates how a narrative from Roman law to European identity was constructed in the twentieth century, and the ideological purposes the fiction was made to serve, including across the divide between National Socialist Europe and a self-styled continent of human rights. There is much to learn from Tuori's erudition and insight.' Samuel Moyn, Yale University