What did the Rwanda Act reveal to you about what happens when political authority doesn't simply change the law, but attempts to determine what judges and officials must treat as legal reality?

Rwanda Act is an act, as you'll know well because you come from this country, of a supreme parliament.

And it's said of the UK parliament that parliament may make any law that it pleases.

And the Rwanda Act is, in technical terms, a perfectly valid statute.

conservative government went through all the hoops that a government has to go through to get a bill enacted into law.

What's more, it has a very clear content.

And if we make a contrast between, as is often done, the rule of law and the rule of men, where the rule of men is supposed to connote something arbitrary, something at people's whim, whereas the rule of law is supposed to be something that delivers a non-arbitrarness or certainty, This perfectly valid act of Supreme Parliament and the democratically elected parliament seemed also to deliver certainty.

Yeah.

And I think in a way, some of what a lot of people feel and are dealing with is actually what are the examples and what do we learn from them? I

think it's instructive to look at Nazi Germany and to read books like Frankl's The Dual State.

But it may be more instructive to look at other states at that time, at Italy, at the fascist state that Dolfus tried to establish in Austria, and also at the state that conservatives tried to put in place in the late 20s and early 30s in Germany.

It's a mistake, I think, and I say this in my book that's about to appear, but I've said it elsewhere, to call Carl Schmitt a Nazi jurist.

I don't think that Schmitt was a Nazi.

Jan has written the best book that's out there about Schmitt and knows more about him than I do.

But Schmitt, as I understand him, only joined up with the Nazis for rather craven reasons.

these issues, and that is apartheid South Africa, I