Legal Histories and Historians in Socialist East Central Europe

Socialism and Legal History: The Histories and Historians of Law in Socialist East Central Europe, edited by Ville Erkkilä and Hans-Peter Haferkamp has been published in the series Routledge Research in Legal History:

This book focuses on the way in which legal historians and legal scientists used the past to legitimize, challenge, explain and familiarize the socialist legal orders, which were backed by dictatorial governments.  The volume studies legal historians and legal histories written in Eastern European countries during the socialist era after the Second World War. The book investigates whether there was a unified form of socialist legal historiography, and if so, what can be said of its common features. The individual chapters of this volume concentrate on the regimes that situate between the Russian, and later Soviet, legal culture and the area covered by the German Civil Code. Hence, the geographical focus of the book is on East Germany, Russia, the Baltic states, Poland and Hungary. The approach is transnational, focusing on the interaction and intertwinement of the then hegemonic communist ideology and the ideas of law and justice, as they appeared in the writings of legal historians of the socialist legal orders. Such an angle enables concentration on the dynamics between politics and law as well as identities and legal history.

Studying the socialist interpretations of legal history reveals the ways in which the 20th century legal scholars, situated between legal renewal and political guidance gave legitimacy to, struggled to come to terms with, and sketched the future of the socialist legal orders. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal History, Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law and European Studies.

About the editors: Ville Erkkilä is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for European Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Hans-Peter Haferkamp is Full Professor of Private Law and History of German Law. He is the Director of the Institute of Modern History of Private Law, German and Rhenish Legal History, University of Cologne.

TOC after the jump.

--Dan Ernst

 Introduction: Socialist interpretations of legal history
Ville Erkkilä

PART I Framing the socialist legal historiography

1 The transformations of some classical principles in socialist Hungarian civil law: The metamorphosis of ‘bona fides’ and ‘boni mores’ in the Hungarian Civil Code of 1959
András Földi

2 We few, we happy few? Legal history in the GDR
Martin Otto

3 Roman law studies in the USSR: An abiding debate on slaves, economy and the process of history
Anton Rudokvas and Ville Erkkilä

4 Strategies of covert resistance: Teaching and studying legal history at the University of Tartu in the Soviet era
Marju Luts-Sootak

5 The Western legal tradition and Soviet Russia: The genesis of H. J. Berman’s Law and Revolution
Adolfo Giuliani

PART II Legal historians of socialist regimes

6 Juliusz Bardach and the agenda of socialist history of law in Poland
Marta Bucholc

7 Valdemars Kalninš (1907–1981): The founder of Soviet legal history in Latvia
Sanita Osipova

8 Getaway into the Middle Ages?: On topics, methods and results of ‘socialist’ legal historiography at the University of Jena
Adrian Schmidt-Recla and Zara Luisa Gries

9 Roman law and socialism: Life and work of a Hungarian scholar, Elemér Pólay
Éva Jakab

Spagnolo, Sampson and friends on Roman law

Coming out this fall with Hart Publishing is Principle and Pragmatism in Roman Law, co-edited by Benjamin Spagnolo (University of Cambridge) and Joe Sampson (University of Oxford). From the press:

This edited collection presents an interesting and original series of essays on the roles of principle and pragmatism in Roman private law.

The book traverses key areas of Roman law to examine the explanatory power of - and delineate interactions between - abstract, doctrinal principle, and pragmatic, real-world problem-solving. Essays canvassing sources of law, property, succession, contracts and delicts sketch the varied roles of theoretical narratives - whether internal to Roman doctrine or derived from external influence - and of practical, policy-based solutions in the jurists' thought.

Principled reasoning in Roman juristic argument ranges from safeguarding commerce, to the priority of acts or intentions in property transactions, to notions of pietas, to Platonic conceptions of the market. Pragmatism is discernible in myriad ways, from divergence between form and substance, to extension of legal rules for economic, social or political utility, to emphasis on what parties did rather than what they said.

The distinctive contribution of the book is its survey of different manifestations of principle and pragmatism across Roman private law. The essays -by eminent as well as emerging academics - will stimulate debates and shed new light on this topic, and will be of interest to both scholars and students of Roman law.

The Table of Contents, which includes no female authors, appears after the jump:

1. Principle and Pragmatism
Benjamin Spagnolo and Joe Sampson

2. Modes of Roman Legal Reasoning in Context: A Brief Survey
Paul J. du Plessis

3. The Case of the Careless Purchaser, or 'Bonitary Ownership' and Ownership
Mike Macnair

4. Explaining D. 41.1.36
Joe Sampson

5. The Place of Rhetoric in Late Republican Law: Some Thoughts on Pietas and the Querela Inofficiosi Testamenti
Graeme Cunningham

6. Writing, Speaking, and the Roman Stipulatio
David Ibbetson

7. Principle and Practice in the Pacta Adiecta
Boudewijn Sirks

8. Plato, Principle, and Pragmatism: Market Regulation in D. 50.11.2
Constantin Willems

9. Limits of Juristic Argument in the Exercitorian Edict
Peter Candy

10. Insulam Exurere: Reading Collatio 12.7.1–3 Closely
Wolfgang Ernst

11. Quasi and (Cor)ruptio
Benjamin Spagnolo

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi