Legal formalism has historically served to license rather than prevent state abuse

Evidence

Channeling Carl Schmitt, she talks about Germany’s—and the West’s—long history of finding the right legal reasons for doing the wrong thing: “In my law school we talked a great deal about law over life.… It’s a verity of our German history: law not to protect life, but to abuse it. We did it to the Jews. In its current American form it licenses torture and state kidnapping” (92). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 329

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘law over life’ inversion connects to a broader critique the reader could use: liberal legal structures can operate as instruments of, not bulwarks against, Islamophobic exclusion. — connects to: Perverted justice under legal forms still constitutes a state of war — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 28
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Le Carré align Annabel’s character with Schmittian legal realism, and does Morey read that as a genuinely critical position or a pessimistic one?