Laying down the law: the American legal revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan/ R.W. Kostal

Abstract

At the close of the Second World War, it became the policy of the United States to cause the permanent demilitarization of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan by their compulsory democratization during a period of military occupation. For American leaders, the indispensable precondition of the democratic political order was the rule of law. This book, then, tells the story of how American agencies designed and implemented the two greatest law reform projects in the history of the world. It is a comparative study of American action and German and Japanese reaction to directed legal and political change. The book explores the capacities and incapacities of mid-20th century Americans in remaking foreign legal and political ideas and institutions. It investigates how and why American agencies helped construct and then, in the first phase of the Cold War, undermine liberal legal revolutions in Germany and Japan.--