Legal formalism in German history licensed abuses later repeated by the US

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

• DEFINE: The ‘law over life’ doctrine is a transferable term for naming how legalism can serve rather than constrain state violence — a vocabulary item directly useful to the reader’s analysis.
• XREF: Connects to Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction and to the ‘state of exception’ Agamben develops from it; also parallels the legal-vacuum discussion in the Naqvi scaffold. — connects to: A general clause accepted without debate grew into Germany’s dominant corrective rule — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 4704
• QUESTION: Worth checking: does Morey use ‘law over life’ as a close reading hinge for the novel’s argument, or just as Annabel’s framing?