Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of National Socialism and Fascism over Europe and its Legal Traditions. Edited by Christian Joerges and Navraj Singh Ghaleigh with a prologue by Michael Stolleis and an epilogue by JHH Weiler. Hart Publishing, 2003. ISBN 1-84113-310-8. BP 55/$ 116.**

Nazism and Fascism undoubtedly left shadows on the German and Italian legal systems. However, most of the contributions to this volume do more to record the state of German and Italian thinking before 1945 than they do to evidence links to the post-1945 Europe. This review will focus on some papers that do strive to show links. One is particularly glad to have Michael Stolleis' review of the ways in which successive cohorts of German law teachers have reacted to the Nazi background. That will be particularly true for readers who cannot make their way through his more comprehensive and detailed account contained in his large history of German public law. James Whitman of Yale has written a provocative account of Nazi concepts of "honor" and its relationship to later European concepts of human dignity – to  which Gerald Neuman of Columbia has written a skeptical response. Neuman notes that some institutions prevalent in Germany before and after 1945 had their roots in the monarchy or in the Weimar republic and were not Nazi inventions. The fact that a given idea was once expressed by a Nazi does not mean that it was wrong; Hitler was ahead of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in recognizing the evils of nicotine. As one with a background only in German legal history I found the chapters on Italian and Spanish law during the regimes of Mussolini and Franco very new and enlightening, but saw little evidence of survival.

The biggest portion of the book and the most tantalizing is the part devoted to the question whether the Nazi order casts a shadow on the European Union. Basically seven of the...