Communism And The Law

European law, including both civil law and common law, has gone through several major phases of expansion in the world. European legal history thus also is a history of legal transplants and cultural borrowings, which national legal histories as products of nineteenth-century historicism have until recently largely left unconsidered. The Handbook of European Legal History supplies its readers with an overview of the different phases of European legal history in the light of today's state-of-the-art research, by offering cutting-edge views on research questions currently emerging in international discussions. The Handbook takes a broad approach to its subject matter both nationally and systemically. Unlike traditional European legal histories, which tend to concentrate on "heartlands" of Europe (notably Italy and Germany), the Europe of the Handbook is more versatile and nuanced, taking into consideration the legal developments in Europe's geographical "fringes" such as Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The Handbook covers all major time periods, from the ancient Greek law to the twenty-first century. Contributors include acknowledged leaders in the field as well as rising talents, representing a wide range of legal systems, methodologies, areas of expertise and research agendas.

From the John Holmes Library collection.

More than twenty-five years after the collapse of the Socialist bloc, the nature of the regimes in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989 continues to evade the attempts of political theorists and scholars of post-communism to define and classify them. Drawing on philosophical inquiry, jurisprudential analysis and intellectual history, this book traces the impact of communist ideology and practice on legal thought: from its critical roots in the midst of the nineteenth century to its reactionary stand in the later years of the twentieth. Exploring how the communist experience – both in its revolutionary and authoritarian guises – has been articulated within the legal theoretical field, the book addresses two central theoretical lacunae fostered by the historiography of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe: the status of law, and its relationship to the broader ideological framework legitimising authoritarian regimes. Moving beyond the limits of the contemporary discourse on communism – particularly as it is channelled through transitional justice and memory studies – Cosmin Cercel develops a theoretical framework that is able to uncover law’s complicity with the extreme ideologies that dominated Central and Eastern Europe. For it is, he argues, in its recourse to legal concepts that the communist experience raises important jurisprudential questions for our contemporary understanding of law, the limits of state sovereignty, and law’s relationship to historical violence.

The Latvian-born legal theorist P.I. Stuchka (1865-1932), generally recognized as one of the principal architects of modern Soviet legal theory and the Soviet legal system itself, was a prodigious author and editor. Twenty essays by Stuchka written between 1917 and 1931 were selected for translation

"This book is concerned to assess, and to draw some of the implications of, the legal developments of these last dozen or so years, specifically as they speak to issues of constitutionalism, dealing with the past, and the rule of law."--Introduction.

This book is among the first books to consider post-communist Europe from the point of view of the rule of law. This book collects articles written by specialists on the rule of law in particular countries. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book reveals the multi-layered complexity of the development of the rule of law after communism.

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. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/socialism-legal-history-ville-erkkil%C3%A4-hans-peter-haferkamp/e/10.4324/9780367814670?context=ubx&refId=2db6d49f-af1c-4b51-9503-9673a131f541, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.”

This study traces the Romanian communist regime’s attempts to extinguish private property in housing. The author analyzes the homeowners’ resistance through law, the subsequent remaking of private property, and the hybrid legal culture of property in early communist Romania.