Refugee scholarship and the universality of legal concepts

Often, a more or less universal quality is attributed to certain legal concepts. For refugee scholars working between 1933 and 1945, the universal quality of these concepts was challenged on two fronts: first, the breaking down of the Weimar Constitution and the German Rechtsstaat under Nazi rule demonstrated the fragility of a constitutional and legal order. Moreover, the breakdown of the German Rechtsstaat was felt on a deeper conceptual level. ‘Immutable’ legal concepts turned out to be easily mutated to conform to Nazi ideology. The second major challenge to the universality of concepts thus pertains to the universal characteristics of the ‘concept of a concept’ itself. In brief, what German refugee legal scholars attempted to create in the course of the 1930s and 1940s was a ‘universal’ Rechtsstaat centred around concepts and legal scholarship that would avoid the breakdown by placing it into a feasible and balanced system of legal enforcement on an international level. Thus, in their new academic context, rather than dismissing the Rechtsstaatliche function of legal concepts and the role of legal scholars, refugee scholarship ventured to enhance it. This contribution argues that the development of Hersch Lauterpacht’s concept of human rights constitutes such an enhancement.