The writer, James Q. Whitman, is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. This book shows that the notorious German Nuremberg Laws were crafted with considerable attention to the precedents that American race laws had to offer.  Whitman looks at the ugly irony that when the Nazis rejected American practices, both in the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.  German praise for American practices, already found in Mein Kampf was continuous throughout the early 1930s.
This book will change the way we think about Jim Crow, Nazis, and America’s role in the world.