1. On 20 April 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in cases seeking the determination of the legal status and judicial access of the Guantánamo detainees. See, e.g., Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334 (D.C. Cir filed 2 Sept. 2003), cert. granted 124 S.Ct. 534 (2003).
2. See, e.g., Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Daniel Heller-Roazen trans., Stanford University Press 1998). Homo Sacer is, according to ancient Roman law, a human being that could not be ritually sacrificed but whom one could kill without being guilty of committing murder. Agamben uses the concept as the underpinning for a fresh decoding of the major political difficulty in our century: the rise of the worst sort of totalitarianisms, with Nazism at its apex.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (reprint, Zone Books 2002).
4. The Nuremberg Laws, decreed at the 1934 Nazi “Party Conference on Freedom” included a law on citizenship, “which deprived all those ‘not of German blood’ of their rights as citizens.” Ingo Müller, Hitler's Justice 96-97 (Deborah Lucas Schneider trans., Harvard University Press 1991).
5. Karlsruhe is the seat of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG – German Federal Constitutional Court) and the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH – German Federal Court of Justice). For a sense of the judicializing-political meaning of Karlsruhe, see Gerhard Casper, The “Karlsruhe Republic” – Keynote Address at the State Ceremony Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Federal Constitutional Court, 2 German Law Journal No. 18 (01 December 2001), at http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=111.