Communists and Their Law

"To my mind this is one of the best books written about Communist-era law. John Hazard was at Harvard Law School and in the 1930s he was selected to go and study Soviet law in Russia at the Moscow Juridical Institute. Later he returned to become an adviser to the US government before going into full-time teaching of Soviet law at Columbia University for over 30 years. I mean, nobody was out there in Russia studying law in the 1930s! He was a pioneer. Until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, everyone who worked in Soviet law had discussions about whether or not Soviet law actually constituted a “new kind of legal system”. Why should anyone care whether it was a “new kind of legal system” or not? A debate about classification – is that worth anything really? Well, the answer is firmly yes – in particular for the Soviets. Classification was important because the Soviet revolution (like the French and American revolutions) was essentially an ideological revolution – about ideas, about alternatives to the way we live our lives, offering a vision of a better world. And so it was important not only that Soviet law did present an alternative but that it was recognised as doing so. As such, Soviet jurists debated hotly whether Soviet law was just a form of legal system dating back to Roman law, through Napoleonic law, or whether it was a “new legal system”, challenging both the previous Roman law system (of which Russia was previously a part) and other existing legal systems such as the common law system (like we have in England) or religious law-based systems. Now a key feature of the Roman law system is that these systems are based on codes (rather than on court decisions with a strong doctrine of precedent like we have in England or the US) – and the thing is that Soviet law also had codes dating back to its earliest days. Hazard makes the case here that the statutes of Soviet law comprise a new legal system in their own right. Until now there were really three main systems of law: Anglo-American, Romanist (like the Napoleonic) and Islamic. Now there was also the Marxian-Socialist system. This last, Hazard argued, was a new competing legal system. They really believed that this was a new system of law that would last for thousands of years, that they were pioneers of a new legal system. In 1967, the books publishing the collections of Soviet laws would read: “The Collected Laws of the USSR 1917-1967 – The First Fifty Years.” There were all sorts of reasons for viewing socialist law as “something different” – the polity was run by “the party”, the state owned the entire economy directly (including all farms and enterprises), and ran things in accordance with a plan, the separation of religion from the state (ie, making state marriages – and divorces – a civil affair), a strong criminal code, and workers’ rights and obligations. This at the same time gave rise to very different points of detail in each of these areas, reflecting the distinctly socialist ideological imperative – for example, the first civil code provided that the civil code should be interpreted to enhance “the protection of the interests of the workers of the state”; crimes were defined in the codes as “socially dangerous acts” including by omission; and, in the early days of Soviet power, inheritance was totally abolished, well other than for deceased male workers whose families might otherwise be destitute. If you want to understand how a Marxist country worked, you pick up this book – a great introductory overview to the strange and interesting parts of the law of that time. The sad thing is that, arguably, it wasn’t that different really to Roman law and it didn’t last very long anyway."