Popular Use of Yugoslav Labor Courts and the Contradiction of Social Courts

Abstract

A basic tenet of communist legal theory is that the judicial function should be socialized, that is, executed by laymen rather than by professional judges. Social courts have been created in all of the Eastern European socialist countries to fulfill this mandate. However, the little empirical evidence available on the use of these courts indicates that they are rarely used voluntarily by individuals, but rather are primarily instruments of state social control over individuals.The major exception to this pattern of use is exhibited by the Yugoslav version of social labor courts, the Courts of Associated Labor (hereafter CAL). These courts are heavily used, and over 90 percent of their cases are brought by individual workers. This paper discusses why the CAL are attractive to individual workers, drawing on ethnographic research in the trial CAL in Belgrade and on the political arguments surrounding a 1982 parliamentary effort to “reform” the CAL out of effective existence. The basic conclusion is that the CAL are successful in attracting individual workers as litigants because they are not really social courts. Further, it is suggested that the idea of social courts is contradictory: Such courts can offer little to most members of society, but instead are even more prone than regular courts to be used as mechanisms for social control by politically powerful elites.