Csaba Varga

A jogváltozás a jog létrejöttével egyidős jelenség. Összetettsége áttekintésére vállalkozik a jelen tanulmánykötet, a Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont Jogtudományi Intézetében záruló kutatási programja elvi alapjainak, történeti dimenzióinak és elméleti-jogi hátterének a feltárását tűzve célul. Hangsúlyosan tárgyalja a jogváltozás formális és informális csatornáit, egyes további tanulmányaiban pedig a kodiikációnak, a történelmi és jelenkori jogátvételeknek, az alkot- mányossági ellenőrzésnek a jogváltozásban játszott szerepét csakúgy, mint a jog átalakulása lehetőségeinek eddig kialakult modelljeit és a tudományos-technikai továbbfejlődés során a jog lényegi jegyeiben várható hangsúlyeltolódások és módosulások elgondolható irányait. Előszó / 1. Jogváltozás a jogban és a jogi folyamatokban 2. Kodifikáció az ezredforduló perspektívájában 3. Jogátvételek: a jogátvitel gyakorlata és dilemmái ma 4. A jog táguló terei, versengéssel a jog meghatározásáért 5. A tudományos-technikai fejlődés és várható kérdőjelei 6. Átalakulóban a jog? / Irodalom

Legal doctrine, doctrine juridique, or as termed in its specialised German cultivation, Rechtsdogmatik, by transforming the given texture of the law into a logically organised conceptual system, will result in changes not of law itself but in the law’s understanding. Thereby it duplicates the legal phenomenon, giving mere wordings conceptuality and systematization. The law’s doctrinal study is practically coeval with law, situated at a meta-level to the law. Considering that law itself is neither theoretical in nature, nor a directly scientific product but is practical a category, the doctrinal study of law does not “cognitively recognize”: nothing from its results can be verified or falsified. As a reflection on what is positivated as valid law, it is just a function of the law. Albeit analogon to theology and theoretical economics, it is no science at all.

Classical texts of continental legal theorising in Hungarian translation: RUDOLF VON JHERING: Kampf ums Recht [1872] / EUGEN EHRLICH: Freie Rechtsfindung und freie Rechtswissenschaft [1903] / HERMANN KANTOROWICZ: Der Kampf um die Rechtswissenschaft [1906] / RUDOLF STAMMLER: Richtiges Recht [1908] & excerpts from his Theorie der Rechtswissenschaft [1911/1923] & Richtiges Recht [1921] / FRANÇOIS GÉNY: Science et technique en droit privé positif [1924: excerpts] / GUSTAV RADBRUCH: Rechtsphilosophie [1932: excerpts] / HANS KELSEN ‘The Pure Theory of Law and Analytical Jurisprudence’ [1941] & ‘The Law as a Specific Social Technique’ [1941] & ‘Value Judgments in the Science of Law’ [1942] / GUSTAV RADBRUCH ‘Gesetzliches Unrecht und übergesetzliches Recht’ [1946] / ALEXANDRE PASSERIN D’ENTRÈVES ‘Le droit naturel’ [1959] / HANS KELSEN ‘What is Justice?’ [1960] & ‘Positivisme juridique et doctrine du droit naturel’ [1963].

La 4e de couverture indique : "The author introduces the reader to reasoning in law through the possilities, boundaries and traps of assuming personal responsibility and impersonal pattern adoption that have arisen in the history of human thought and in the various legal cultures. He discloses actual processes hidden by the veil of patterns followed in thinking, processes that we encounter both in our conceptual-logical quests for certainties and in the undertaking of fertilising ambiguity. When trying to identify definitions lurking behind the human construct of facts, nitons, norms, logic, and thinking, or behind the practice of giving meanings, he discovers tradition in our presuppositions, and our world-view and moral stance in our tacit agreements. Recognising the importance of the role communication plays in shaping society, he describes our existence and institutions as self-regulating processes. Since law is a wholly social venture, we not only take part in its oeuvre with our entire personality, but are also collectively responsible for its destiny. In the final analysis, anything can be qualified as 'legal' or 'non-legal' in one or another recognised sense in which law can originate, but, as a relative totality, it can only be qualified as 'more legal' or 'less legal' in any combination of the above senses. Being formed in an uninterrupted process, neither the totality nor particular pieces of law can be taken as complete or unchangeably identical with itself. Therefore law can only be identified through its motions and computable states of 'transforming into' or 'withdrawing from' the distinctive domain of the law. Thereby both society at large and its legal professionals actually contribute to -by shaping incessantly- what presents itself as ready-to-take, according to the law's official ideology. For our initation, play, role-undertaking and human responsibility lurk behind the law's formal mask in the backstage. Or, this equals to realise that all we have become subjects from mere objects, actors from mere addressees. And despite the variety of civilisational overcoasts, the entire culture of law is still exclusively inherent in us who experience it day to day. We bear it and shape it. Everything coventional in it is convenctionalised by us. It has no further existence or effect bexond this. And with its existence inherent in us, we cannot convey the responsibility to be born for it on somebody else either. It is ours in its totality so much that it cannot be torn out of our days or acts. It will thus turn into what we guard it to become. Therefore we must take care of it at all times since we are, in many ways, taking care of our own"

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

{texts from Western & Eastern Marxism} Introduction xiii–xxvii; ORIGINS L. S. MAMUT ‘Questions of Law in Marx’s Capital’ [1968] 3–10, PETER SCHÖTTLER ‘Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky as Critics of »Legal Socialism«’ [1986] 11–42, WILLIAM LEON MCBRIDE ‘The Concept of Justice in Marx, Engels, and Others’ [1975] 43–57; BOUNDARIES WILLIAM LEON MCBRIDE ‘Marxism and Natural Law’ [1970] 61–87, ZDRAVKO GREBO ‘»Kelsenism« and Marxism’ [1985] 89–107, KÁLMÁN KULCSÁR ‘The Historical Concept in the Science of Law of the XXth Century’ [1963] 109–148; TRENDS EUGENE KAMENKA ‘A Marxist Theory of Law?’ [1983] 151–177, R. WARRINGTON ‘Pashukanis and the Commodity Form Theory’ [1981] 179–200, EUGENE KAMENKA ‘Lukács and Law’ [1987] [= books1981/review] 201–208, MICHAEL JAWORSKYJ ‘Soviet Critique of the »Bourgeois« Philosophy of Law’ [1960] 209–232, RICHARD KINSEY ‘Marxism and the Law: Preliminary Analyses’ [1978] 233–258; CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IMRE SZABÓ ‘The Notion of Law’ [1976] 261–270, WIESLAW LANG ‘Law and Morality from a Marxist Point of View’ [1976] 271–286, JERZY KOWALSKI ‘Idea of Equality and the Law’ [1985] 287–291, JERZY WRÓBLEWSKI ‘Problems of Legality in Marxist Theory’ [1976] 293–311, CSABA VARGA ‘Rationality and the Objectification of Laws’ [1975/d] 313–338, LI CHANGDAO ‘The Old Law Cannot Be Critically Inherited, It Can Only Be Used as a Mirror’ [1980] 339–343; PERSPECTIVES FOR SOCIO-LEGAL ANALYSIS IMRE SZABÓ ‘The Social Limits of Law’ [1972] 347–359, CSABA VARGA ‘Towards a Sociological Concept of Law: An Analysis of Lukács’ Ontology’ [1981/a] 361–378, STEVEN SPITZER ‘Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Law’ [1983] 379–400, PETER FITZPATRICK ‘Marxism and Legal Pluralism’ [1983] 401–415; LAW AND IDEOLOGY KÁLMÁN KULCSÁR ‘Ideological Changes and the Legal Structure: A Discussion of Socialist Experience’ [1980] 419–439, ALAN HUNT ‘The Ideology of Law: Advances and Problems in Recent Applications of the Concept of Ideology to the Analysis of Law’ [1985] 441–467, ALAN STONE ‘The Place of Law in the Marxian Structure–Superstructure Archetype’ [1985] 469–497; FINAL ACCOUNT CSABA VARGA ‘Liberty, Equality and the Conceptual Minimum of Legal Mediation’ [1989/a] 501–523; w/ Name Index.