FORM AND SUBSTANCE OF LEGAL CONTINUITY

Abstract

AbstractThe distinction between form and substance (content), which is derived from philosophy, plays a significant role in contemporary scientific legal discourse. Therefore, it seems important to confront the phenomena of legal continuity with the various understandings of the form vs. substance distinction, found in scientific legal discourse. The analysis is justified by the fact that in scientific legal discourse the indication that a certain form of reasoning is ‘formalist’ or that a certain phenomenon is ‘simply formal’ but not ‘substantive’ has a strong evaluative aspect. In his earlier works the author of the article has proposed, by referring inter alia to the works of K. Renner and h. Collins, to use the concept of ‘legal survivals’ in order to conceptualise the phenomenon of legal continuity ocurring in the case of continued existence of concrete and determined legal institutions, despite a change of the political and economic system, accompanied often by the change of socio-economic function of those surviving legal institutions. This allows to formulate a research question as to whether legal survivals are of a ‘formal’ or ‘substantive’ nature. Referring to four distinct ways of understanding the form vs. substance dichotomy in contempoary scientific legal discourse, the present paper replies to the research question by indicating in which sense of the distinction can legal continuity be described as ‘formal’, and in which as ‘substantive’.