scholarly journals Eugenics between Darwin’s Εra and the Holocaust

Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 171
Author(s):  
George Boutlas ◽  
Dimitra Chousou ◽  
Daniela Theodoridou ◽  
Anna Batistatou ◽  
Christos Yapijakis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
Positive Prevention ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Medical Ethos ◽  
Matters Of Concern

Heredity and reproduction have always been matters of concern. Eugenics is a story that began well before the Holocaust, but the Holocaust completely changed the way eugenics was perceived at that time. What began with Galton (1883) as a scientific movement aimed at the improvement of the human race based on the theories and principles of heredity and statistics became by the beginning of the 20th century an international movement that sought to engineer human supremacy. Eugenic ideas, however, trace back to ancient Greek aristocratic ideas exemplified in Plato’s Republic, which played an important role in shaping modern eugenic social practices and government policies. Both positive (prevention and encouragement of the propagation of the fit, namely without hereditary afflictions, i.e. socially acceptable) and negative (institutionalization, sterilization, euthanasia) eugenics focused on the encouragement of healthy and discouragement of unhealthy reproduction. All these practices were often based on existing prejudices about race and disability. In this article, we will focus on the rise of eugenics, starting with the publication of Origin of Species to the Holocaust. This examination will be multidisciplinary, utilizing genetics, legal history and bioethical aspects. Through this examination, we will discuss how provisional understandings of genetics influenced eugenics-based legislation. We will also discuss the rise of biopolitics, the change of medical ethos and stance towards negative eugenics policies, and the possible power of bioethical principles to prevent such phenomena.

Searching for Justice After the Holocaust

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Bazyler ◽  
Kathryn Lee Boyd ◽  
Kristen L. Nelson ◽  
Rajika L. Shah
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Insurance Policies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
Property Restitution

The Nazis and their cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate unclear and hostile legal paths to recover their stolen property from governments and neighbors who often had been complicit in their persecution and theft. While the return of Nazi-looted art and recent legal settlements involving dormant Swiss bank accounts, unpaid insurance policies and use of slave labor by German companies have been well-publicized, efforts by Holocaust survivors and heirs over the last 70 years to recover stolen land and buildings were forgotten. In 2009, 47 countries convened in Prague to deal with the lingering problem of restitution of prewar private, communal, and heirless property stolen during the Holocaust. The outcome was the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, aiming to “rectify the consequences” of the wrongful Nazi-era immovable property seizures. This book sets forth the legal history of Holocaust immovable property restitution in each of the Terezin Declaration signatory states. It also analyzes how each of the 47 countries has fulfilled the standards of the Guidelines and Best Practices of the Terezin Declaration. These standards were issued in 2010 in conjunction with the establishment of the European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI), a state-sponsored NGO created to monitor compliance. The book is based on the Holocaust (Shoah) Immovable Property Restitution Study commissioned by ESLI, written by the authors and issued in Brussels in 2017 before the European Parliament.

A Welcome Conversation: Toward a New Historiography of Intellectual Property

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 1113-1129
Author(s):  
Kali Murray
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay considers what tools should be used to study the legal history of intellectual property. I identify three historiographical strategies: narration, contest, and formation. Narration identifies the diverse “narrative structures” that shape the field of intellectual property history. Contest highlights how the inherent instability of intellectual property as a legal concept prompts recurrent debates over its meaning. Formation recognizes how intellectual property historians can offer insight into broader legal history debates over how to consider the relationship between informal social practices and formalized legal mechanisms. I consider Kara W. Swanson's Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk and Sperm in Modern America (2014) in light of these historiographical strategies and conclude that Swanson's book guides us to a new conversation in the legal history of intellectual property law.

scholarly journals Indigenous and Foreign Influences on the Early Russian Legal Heritage

Slavic Review ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-282
Author(s):  
Samuel Kucherov
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Legal History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
Matters Of Concern

For long years Russia’s legal history has intrigued the scholars of Eastern Europe, and some in the West, but little attention has been devoted in English to the most ancient sources, those to be found in the chronicles and the Russkaia Pravda. Although Russian legal history offers little of the continuity of institutions to be found in Anglo-Saxon law, its earliest documents are matters of concern even to Soviet legal historians in an effort to understand a heritage that has left its impact upon contemporary developments. In order to sketch a part of that heritage conveniently for English-language readers, this brief article has been prepared.

scholarly journals Types of Love Between People: A Modern Perspective Using A Descriptive Assessment of Survey Research

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip D. Clingan
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Good Relationship ◽  
Descriptive Assessment ◽  
The Bible ◽  
True Love ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Modern Perspective

Love is the strong affection a person has towards the other person. Love can be between people of different gender, age, colour, social status, religion, or nationality. True love knows no boundaries, and that is why there exist different types of love. Most of the different types of love are derived from ancient Greek. The purpose of the study is to show why different people will have a different kind of love and why each of the love is important to the parties involved. The love between two people can take different forms, and two parties cannot have all the ten types of love discussed. The ten types of love discussed include love for parents, love for friends, agape love, love for animals, intimate love, selfish love, and unenduring love for friends, love for close friends, obsessive love towards people, and child love. Each of the love is unique in its way and is beneficial to both parties involved. The greatest of these types of love is agape love. A good example of agape love was portrayed in the life of Jesus in the Bible. He loved the human race unconditionally and gave all to save them from humanity. Also, child love and parent love are important types of love because they enhance strong bonds between parents and their children. Animal love can be obsessive because it will make a person become too close to animals in caring for them. However, it’s an important type of love because it creates a good relationship between human beings and animals. Animals tend to feel protected in the presence of human beings.

The Forgiveness to Come

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Banki
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Unresolved Question ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
To Come

The book addresses the difficulties posed by the Holocaust for a thinking of forgiveness inherited from the Abrahamic (i.e., monotheistic) tradition. As a way to approach these difficulties, it explores the often radically divergent positions in the debate on forgiveness in the literature of Holocaust survivors. Forgiveness is sometimes understood as a means of self-empowerment (Eva Mozes Kor); part of the inevitable process of historical normalization and amnesia (Jean Améry); or otherwise as an unresolved question, that will survive all trials and remain contemporary when the crimes of the Nazis belong to the distant past (Simon Wiesenthal). On the basis of an examination of Jacques Derrida’s concept of forgiveness (as forgiveness of the unforgivable) and its elaboration in relation to the juridical concept of Crimes Against Humanity, the book undertakes close readings of Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower (Die Sonnenblume (1969)), Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits (Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966)), Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Forgiveness (Le Pardon (1967)), and Robert Antelme’s The Human Race (L’espèce humaine (1947)). In addition, it analyses the documentary film Forgiving Doctor Mengele (2006) on Eva Mozes Kor. Each of these works bears witness to “aporias,” or unsolvable impasses, of forgiveness, justice and responsibility in relation to the Holocaust. The book argues that Derrida’s concept of forgiveness has the capacity to transform the debate about forgiveness and the Holocaust and open new ways to read the literature, which turns around this question.

When Men Wore Veils to Worship: the Historical Context of 1 Corinthians 11.4

1988 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Oster
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Concerns ◽  
Full Study

1 Corinthians 11. 2–16, because of the social concerns of much contemporary exegesis and theology, has provided a rich vein from which to quarry materials for current feminist agendas. However, exegetes have tended to neglect the ‘male issue’ in this text and the Corinthian context underlying it. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the most plausible matrix of the practices addressed by Paul in 1 Cor 11. 4 when he refers to. Numerous exegetical issues and ancient social practices relevant to a full study of 1 Cor 11. 2–16 do not fall within the purview of this narrow investigation. Questions such as the origin and character of Paul's views of women as well as their apparel, and the question of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish customs concerning the veiling of women in their domestic and street apparel will not be broached here.

Crimes against Humanity or the Phantasm of “We, Men”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Banki
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Community ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Human Race ◽  
The Holocaust

In chapter one I also analysed in what sense the invention of the juridical concept of “crimes against humanity” in international law has been interpreted by Derrida as a sign of moral progress, a sign of history (Geschichtszeichen) in the Kantian sense. By virtue of this juridical concept, the international community recognizes—at least in principle—a crime whose seriousness is such that it remains universally and eternally open to prosecution. In this chapter, I analyse in what senses the concept of “crimes against humanity” remains, despite this moral advance, bound to a humanist metaphysics whose limits today need to be acknowledged. This chapter includes a reading of the statutes themselves in international law, as well as Robert Antelme’s The Human Race (L’espèce humaine (1948)): an autobiographical testimony of survival in the Nazi concentration camps where the humanist metaphysics underlying the concept of crimes against humanity is reaffirmed in a very memorable way. On the basis of the deconstruction of humanist metaphysics, I ask whether the Holocaust must be interpreted as something more or other than a ‘crime against humanity.’

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