Csaba Varga

I. Playing a Game II. The Precondition to Mete out a Legal Sanction III. A Non-cognitively Homogeneous Activity IV. The Reproduction of the Law as a System 1. The Claim for Normative Closedness 2. The Openness of the Communication about Facts Rule of law proclaims the ethos of legal distinctiveness through institutionalizing normative closure, while the rule of facts proclaims a legal functioning embedded in facts as rooted in common sense evidence, backed by practical openness in its functioning. All in all, while rule of law argues for the law’s self-differentiation, the rule of facts ascertains why legal enterprise is (notwithstanding the same) what the heterogeneity of everyday practice and experience suggest it is. In the final analysis, I guess that these two aspects are able only in supplementation of one another to serve the common interest in making the law operate in a socially meaningful way. That is, they are to guarantee distinctively legal operation actually taking place, on the one hand, at a time when and under the conditions in which all its normative preconditions are fully met, on the other.

There are internationally set criteria that apply in the case of a legacy of grave and systematic violations of human rights, generating obligations of the state towards the victims and society. They specify: a right of the victim to see justice done, a right to know the truth, an entitlement to compensation and nonmonetary forms of restitution, as well as a right to reorganized and accountable institutions. Facing the complete failure of implementing the first three points, one can claim that none of them has been fulfilled in Hungary since the fall of Communism, almost one quarter of a century ago. This paper analyses the context in which constitutional adjudication may confront certainty of law with the very idea of justice by putting an end to any progress of leaving the legacy of Communism behind. As a consequence, the Rule of Law becomes a mere simulacrum.

Fac simile of documents [mostly letters & dedications] from & to FELIX SOMLÓ (1873–1918) (including by Leonidas Pitamic and Adolf Merkl, among others) & JULIUS MOÓR (1888–1950) (including by M. Stockhammer, Wilhelm Sauer, Karl Petraschek, among others), followed by HANS KELSEN’s Selbstbiographie [February 1927] (15–22 w/ letter, 23) & ILMAR TAMMELO’s only surviving copy of his PhD thesis in his own translation on Kritik zu Prof. Kliimann’s normativistischer Unterscheidung des Privat- und des öffentlichen Rechts [Dorpat, 1942] (63–145), both prepared to the latter; w/ Bibl. & Preface [1995/e] x–xv, as well as documentation in Hungarian on how the Editor could save their rich personal professional library of several thounds volumes and making acquired them by the Library of Parliament in Budapest as its special collection in Anhang (147–156); Personenverzeichnis.

Investingating mediations between the social total complex and its partial complexes, Lukács emphasised language and law as aents having the sole function to mediate. Ideology as part of human's societal existence is itself organic component of the ontology of social existence. The way we think in is part of what we truly are. Juristic world-view as the deontoloy of the legal profession is one of the factors of the law's social existence. Actual decision making in law is modelled by the logic of problem solving with open chanes within an open referential frame, upon which the logic of justification is built as added to the former posteriorly. Lukács designated the settling of the conflict of interests involved through the law's system of fulfilment as manipulation. This substantiates the personal responsibility of the decision maker