It has been remarked that the ‘rupture thesis’ prevails within the AngloAmerican
legal academy in its understanding of the legal system in Nazi Germany.
This article explores the existence and origins of this idea—that ‘Nazi law’ represented
an aberration from normal legal-historical development with a point of
rupture persisting between it and the ‘normal’ or central concept of law—within
jurisprudential discourse in order to illustrate the prevalence of a distorted
(mis)representation of Nazi law and how this distortion is manifested within the
discourse today. An analysis of the treatment of Nazi law in two major 50th
anniversary publications about the 1958 Hart–Fuller debate, and a review of representations
of the Third Reich within literature from the current discourse,
demonstrates that the rupture thesis continues to be reproduced within jurisprudence.
An examination of the role of Nazi law in the Hart–Fuller debate itself shows
that it can be traced back to the debate, where it was constructed through a combination
of conceptual determinism and historical omission. It concludes that the
historical Nazi law has great significance for the concept of law, but neither positivism
nor natural law has properly theorised the nature of the real Nazi legal
system.

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• The Distorted Jurisprudential Discourse of Nazi Law: Uncovering the ‘Rupture Thesis’ in the AngloAmerican Legal Academy