The Hart-Fuller Debate, Transitional Societies and the Rule of Law

Much of the enduring energy and tension in the Hart–Fuller debate stems from the two protagonists’ reflections on ‘the testimony of those who have descended into Hell, and, like Ulysses or Dante, brought back a message for human beings’. The testimony referred to, of course, was that of witnesses and survivors of Nazism, and, within this context, Nazi law. It raised, in the starkest manner imaginable, questions about the ‘laws’ of truly evil regimes, and about what adequate responses to such experiences might require. Those are not issues we have left behind us. Nazism might have been the most satanic of regimes, but it has had more than a few rivals. Perhaps fortuitously, certainly fortunately, many of them exploded or imploded in and since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their successors, scores of which lost their despots, some more satanic, some less, around that time, were dubbed ‘transitional societies’ or ‘societies in transition’.