The Revival of Comparative Law in a Socialist Country: The Impact of Imre Szabó and Gyula Eörsi on the Development of Hungarian Comparative Law

Abstract

This article discusses the revival of comparative law in Hungarian Socialist jurisprudence. Prior to World War II, the development of comparative law generally had followed international trends; however, it was disrupted at both a personal and an institutional level at the end of the 1940s due to the Marxist-Leninist turn of legal thinking that accompanied the introduction of a Communist regime in the country. Nonetheless, this rejection of comparative law was gradually replaced by a more open attitude that strongly supported participation in the international comparative-law movement from the 1960s. Imre Szabó and Gyula Eörsi played a prominent role in this transformation. They legitimized the use of comparative methods in Socialist jurisprudence and, also, created a plausible conceptual framework for Socialist comparative law.

Keywords: comparative law, history of comparative law, legal theory, classification of legal systems, Central-Europe