There has been and continues to be a remarkable revival in academic interest in Carl Schmitt's thought within politics, but this is the first book to address his thought from an explicitly legal theoretical perspective. Transcending the prevailing one-sided and purely historical focus on Schmitt’s significance for debates that took place in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933, this book addresses the actual and potential significance of Schmitt's thought for debates within contemporary Anglo-American legal theory that have emerged during the past three decades. These include: the critique of legal positivism; the ‘indeterminacy thesis’ of American Critical Legal Studies; the reinterpretation of law as a form of strategically disguised politics by the contemporary sociology of law movement; the emphasis upon law as implicated in, and as aspect of, a network of mobile yet dispersed power relationships irreducible to a central state; the legal theoretical critique of human rights and liberalism more generally; Schmitt’s critique of innovations within international criminal law: the inhumanity and hypocrisy of supposedly universalistic ‘crimes against humanity’; and the retrospective criminalisation of ‘aggressive war’ as part of the Nuremberg trials process. In these respects, therefore, Michael Salter provides an overview and assessment of Schmitt's thought, as well as a consideration of its relevance for contemporary legal thought.
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