ABSTRACT
Solzhenitsyn calls him "evil and quick of mind," a cameo appearance in Arthur Koestler'sDarkness at Noon has him shouting his infamous line "Shoot them like mad dogs!" and his name becomes an expletive in the Chicago Seven trial as a synonym for blatant judicial persecution in the cause of political justice. Typical assessments of his Law of the Soviet State-an authoritative constitutional text published in the USSR in 1938, and first published in English in 1948 under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies-include devastating reviews by Lon Fuller (1949) and Harold Berman (1949). Fuller (1949:1157) angrily remarked that it "dodges every real problem its thesis might seem to suggest and substitutes for reasoned analysis the scurrilous and abusive recriminations for which its author-editor has become famous in international conferences''; Berman (1949:595) more soberly concluded that distaste for his invective and distortion should not obscure the very real issues reflected in the book. Not all assessments of him have been so harsh. Harold Laski, for example, said of his early trial work in the 1930s, "[he] ... was doing what an ideal Minister ofJustice would do if we had such a person in Great Britain-forcing colleagues to consider what is meant by actual experience of the law in action" (1935:21). An American Marxist has even recently stated that his jurisprudence ''outlines in summary form the Marxist theory oflaw" (Terrar, 1981:55).
