Teaching Land Law: Controversy and Land Policy in Hungary from 1948 to 1968

Abstract

Topic of the study. During the harsh Stalinization from 1948 agriculture had to be collectivized while land was not nationalized by decree as the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917. The Soviet legal system was a pattern for jurists but the differences made the transition to “socialism” more rugged and controversial. The legal scholars had to interpret a situation which had to develop further to full “socialization”. In order to do that, a “cooperative law” and a “land law” had to be created and taught as part of “agricultural law”. Research questions and methods. Land law consisted of regulations regarding private farmers and collective agricultural producers (cooperatives, state farms etc.), theoretically in the whole research period. How did the agrarian, cooperative and land policy affect legal theory on land tenure system? What kind of scientific dispute emerged on this matter and how did the attempts of codification of land law affect legal education? Various types of sources were evaluated, for instance protocols of council meetings of the faculty of law of two universities, archival sources, articles and studies from authors who taught land law and took part in its debate and codification. Results and conclusions. Law was used as a tool to boost transformation, and the lawmakers and jurists faced a paradox situation in which there was a need of codification of land law and to make it independent from other branches of law. On the one hand, jurists argued like Gyula Eörsi and Miklós Világhy that civil law had primatus in the legal system and property relations had to be included in that part of legislation during the “transition period”. On the other hand, many jurists, for instance Iván Földes, Imre Seres claimed that cooperative law or/and land law were separated branches of law despite the fact that mass collectivization was not completed until the spring of 1961.