Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

by James Q. Whitman

whatever resemblances there may have been, the fact remains that the Nazi courts descended into appalling depths of lawlessness. Even at their worst, American courts were better.

the early New Deal, founded as it was on the Mephistophelean bargain between economic reformers and southern racists.

America was struggling to be open about its legal racism, as it ought to be, but that it had not yet managed to do so.

Sometimes the American democratic political process produces admirable legislation. But to have a common-law system like that of America is to have a system in which the traditions of the law do indeed have little power to ride herd on the demands of the politicians, and when the politics is bad, the law can be very bad indeed.

the election of judges and prosecutors, a practice unheard of in the rest of the world.

numerous Nazi lawyers regarded America as the prime exemplar; and, much though we may wish to deny it, it was not outlandish for them to think of their program of the early 1930s as a more thoroughgoing and rigorous realization of American approaches toward blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and others