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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2018
The jurists who entered Turkish academia during the 1930s built the foundations of their discipline under a regime that became increasingly authoritarian as war drew closer. Like their peers in Italy and France, therefore, they had to produce coherent doctrines but also support the frequent use of exceptional emergency powers. How did they solve this contradiction? More importantly, what consequences did their solutions have for the use of emergency powers after the war? This article adopts a Deleuzian reading of two strategies with which Turkish jurists met that challenge, approaching their work not simply as theories about law but also as models for the role law should play in the articulation of public authority. Focusing on Ali Fuad Başgil and Sıddık Sami Onar, law professors at Istanbul University, I argue that although both professors supported the regime, only a situational doctrine of the kind Onar produced was capable of ensuring that jurists would have a place in the exercise of “exceptional” state powers after the 1950 transition to democracy.
Author's note: This article grew out of my PhD work at the University of Washington. I am grateful to my advisor Rachel A. Cichowski for introducing me to the world of law, and to my other two advisors, Joel S. Migdal and Reşat Kasaba, for thoughtful comments throughout the entire process. The research and time needed to write it was made possible by grants from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, a University of Washington Chester Fritz grant, and the Institute of Turkish Studies. For encouragement and feedback on several iterations of this article, I wish to thank everyone who attended the February 2014 meeting of CETOBaC at the Collège de France, the participants in the University of Washington's Turkish Circle, in particular Reşat Kasaba, Mehmet Kentel, Matthew Goldman, and Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, and the participants in the publication seminar at the Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Oslo, in particular Rania Maktabi. I also want to thank the three anonymous referees at IJMES for their insightful critiques, as well as Jeffrey Culang and Akram Khater.
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