Introduction
The story of comparative law in Hungary in the Interwar years is largely unknown to the foreign audience. The main reasons for this include the practical inaccessibility of the relevant Hungarian sources and the ideologically led oblivion during the communist days. This piece presents the almost completely forgotten oeuvre of Miklós Újlaki, who played a foundational role in the establishment of comparative legal studies in this period.
The end of World War I had brought dramatic consequences for Hungary. By the signature of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 the former Hungarian Kingdom, a component of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, lost almost two-thirds of its territory, including Hungarian cities and regions in Transylvania, Northern Hungary, and Southern Hungary (for details, see C. A. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors. The Treaty of Trianon and its Consequences 1919-1937 (Oxford University Press 1937)). In addition, the years following the end of World War I were characterised by various political and social upheavals – for example, the rise and fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 or the inflow of immigrants from those parts of the country that were transferred as a consequence of the peace treaty. That is, considering all these political and social challenges and the severe economic crisis, the first decade of the Interwar years was a traumatic period in the 20th century history of Hungary.
However, paradoxically, the Interwar period also led to the flourishing of comparative legal studies in Hungary. In essence, Hungarian legal academia – still shocked by the negative consequences of World War I that also had an impact on their personal lives – had to make serious efforts to come to terms with this new situation. Besides many other challenges, the new status quo – in which Hungary suddenly became a country among other ones in the Carpathian Basin – implied that a well-functioning unified legal space created by both Hungarian and Austrian law just broke to distinctive pieces right before the eyes of Hungarian legal academics. Therefore, a comparative approach was legitimised by the new situation itself.
It has to be added that comparative law in Europe started to acquire a new, more practical orientation from the 1900s. The era’s new comparative law initiatives, coined by authors such as Édouard Lambert, Raymond Saleilles, or Ernst Rabel, challenged the earlier understandings of comparative legal studies. This also fostered a new attitude towards comparative law in Hungary during the Interwar period because these authors offered proper tools to study the legal transformation of the region.
The earlier understanding of comparative law in Hungarian legal academia followed the ideas of both the German Universalrechtsgeschichte – a 19th century understanding of general legal history focusing on the elaboration of a macro view of the world’s legal development from ancient times – and the English Historical and Comparative Jurisprudence from the 1870s. Therefore, it had a rather abstract, speculative character. In stark contrast, comparative law initiatives during the Interwar period developed new, qualitatively different aspirations in Hungary. The study of contemporary legal provisions took precedence over earlier speculations about the entire course of legal history and the earliest phases of legal development from a comparative perspective. Needless to say, the above-mentioned drastic transformation of the socio-political and cultural context also boosted this change of focus as it turned the attention of the scholarly community towards recent legal developments.
An Unconventional Life: from Budapest to New York
The main representative of this new orientation of comparative law in Hungary was Miklós Ujlaki (1906-1985), a distinguished private law expert and practising lawyer. He came from the so-called “Szladits-school” dominating the era’s understanding of private law issues. The “Szladits-school” formed around the person of Károly Szladits (1871-1956), the most respected private law professor of the Interwar period in Budapest. Its guiding idea was that the strong customary character of Hungarian private law had to be reformed by seeking inspiration in foreign experience with special regard to practical details. So, the intellectual environment of Ujlaki implied a comparative outlook from the outset of his scholarly activities.
As for comparative law, the most active period of Ujlaki’s professional life was the 1930s-1940s. He left Hungary in 1948 for good when the political climate in the country started to change drastically because of the expansion of communist political forces promoting clear Stalinist ideas. First, he decided to stay in Sweden where he gave comparative law lectures at the Law Faculty at Stockholm University from mid-1948. Then, he moved to the United States at the end of 1949. He taught mostly in the area of international law at the New School for Social Research from 1951 to 1956. Thereafter, he worked as an attorney in Manhattan. Interestingly, his last scholarly paper appeared in the Liber Amicorum Adolf F. Schnitzer –– published in Genève in 1979. Schnitzer was one of the main advocates of legal unification in European legal academia from the 1940s. In this paper, Ujlaki dealt with the difficulties of legal unification that was the prominent topic of his comparative law research during the 1930s, too (for more details on Ujlaki’s life, see: Péter Nagy, ‘Hungarian Scholar of Czechoslovak Law in the USA. The Life and Works of Miklós Ujlaki’ [2023] 14 Journal on European History of Law 104-111).
Legal Unification in the Neighbouring Countries: Ujlaki’s Criticism
Ujlaki’s project can be summarized as follows. He focused on the question of how Hungarian private law continued to exist in those countries that acquired certain territories of the Hungarian Kingdom due to the provisions of the Treaty of Trianon. By formulating this research question, Ujlaki pointed out an intriguing consequence of the peace treaties ending World War I: as previously united legal spaces were disintegrated by the changing of national borders, this led to qualitatively new and unprecedented legal challenges in Europe. Since five countries acquired some territories from the Hungarian Kingdom, Ujlaki studied the afterlife of Hungarian private law in all these countries. His research included study stays in German legal research institutes – for example in the Osteuropa-Institut in Breslau in 1930-1931 – and field data collection in the neighbouring countries. From 1931 to 1936, he published extensively on the transformation of Hungarian private law in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. In addition to various Hungarian papers published either in the prestigious Hungarian journal Jogtudomány Közlöny or individually as booklets, Ujlaki also published his findings in German. His German publications appeared in scholarly journals focusing on East European legal issues such as the Zeitschrift für Ostrecht or the Zeitschrift für Osteuropäisches Recht.
A good example to present his method of study is provided by his paper on ‘The Fate of Hungarian Law in the Territories Annexed to Yugoslavia’ from 1934. In this paper, Ujlaki examined the various laws which were in force in Yugoslavia at the time as the first step. In general, he argued that the Yugoslavian legal order had a strong pluralistic character as the various regions of the country were governed by different laws – from Austrian law (Croatia), through Muslim and Turkish law (Bosnia and Herzegovina), to Hungarian private law in Vojvodina. The latter was the ethnically very diverse northern region of East Yugoslavia (current Northern Serbia), which has a considerable Hungarian population to this day, that enhanced this patchwork. He also argued that the main way to find which rule was to be applied in a dispute concerning conflicting laws was the principle of “locus regit actum” (the place is the decisive factor when determining the applied law). In the second part of his article, he pointed out that many provisions of the previous Hungarian laws were still in effect in Vojvodina 16 years after the peace treaty was signed since either the National Council in Novi Sad – today the “capital” of Vojvodina – decided to uphold them temporarily in 1918 or because a common rule being valid in the entire territory of Yugoslavia was still lacking. In the concluding part of his article, he presented a meticulous list of those particular Yugoslavian laws that overruled the former Hungarian statutory or customary legal provisions. His conclusion focuses on the development of legal unification in Yugoslavia: he argued that this process would disrupt the still existing legal community in the region of Vojvodina with Hungary.
Ujlaki summarized his findings and analysis in a lecture he gave at the Ferencz József University, Szeged, in 1936. Later that year, an expanded and refined version of this lecture was published by this university. This booklet can definitely be regarded as a key outcome of comparative law in Hungary during the Interwar years. Besides a detailed presentation of the complexity of the legal orders in neighbouring states, he also presented an in-depth discussion of the afterlife of Hungarian marriage law provisions in these countries. For example, he argued that a simple extension of the Romanian Civil Code enacted in 1865, rooted in the Code Napoléon, to the territories of Transylvania where Hungarian private law governed family and marriage issues was a rather complicated task as the former Hungarian law provided more elaborate rules and a higher level of legal protection than the Code Napoléon’s rather old-fashioned provisions. Therefore, the various regional bar councils – composed of local Hungarian, Romanian, and German lawyers – of Transylvania opposed this government plan and the creation of a new Romanian civil code had to be postponed.
Assessment
In essence, Ujlaki’s work is to be regarded as a path-breaking study of the development of such Central European national legal orders in which various local laws coexist. Ujlaki convincingly presents the difficulties and pitfalls of these processes and also highlights the limits of legal unification. Due to his perspective – he was a Hungarian lawyer discussing the afterlife of Hungarian private law provisions in such territories that were historical parts of the Hungarian Kingdom beforehand – he was very critical of the idea of legal unification. These unificatory attempts occurring in the neighbouring countries and led by these countries’ political and legal elites were regarded by Ujlaki as political efforts to weaken the existing legal unity among Hungary and the ‘lost territories’ besides their primary aim to provide unified rules for the citizens. Nevertheless, he also highlighted that while the political unity could be reached by swift political decisions made by the winning powers and codified by various international treaties, the formation of a truly unified legal space was a much longer and rather dubious process which strongly depended on the survival of the former legal rules, decisions, and customary practices as well as on the attitude of the local legal elites.
All in all, Ujlaki’s papers are worth reading even though they fitted well into the pervasive and many times offensive nationalistic sentiments of his era. Behind this nationalistic orientation, one can find meticulous and hard work – we should not forget that he collected the relevant private law sources of five Central European countries and compared them to the provisions of Hungarian private law – and a thought-provoking, dominantly critical scholarly attitude. While his era’s comparative law attitude openly favoured and supported the idea of legal unification – just think of Édouard Lambert’s droit commun législatif or Henri Lévy-Ullmann’s droit mondial (see: Édouard Lambert, La fonction du droit civil comparé (V. Girard et Brière 1903) or Pierre Lepaulle, ‘Henri Lévy-Ullmann et le droit mondial’ in Léon Julliot de la Morandière – Marc Ancel (eds), L’oeuvre juridique de Lévy-Ullmann (Centre français de droit comparé 1952)) – Ujlaki presented a much more realistic picture of it. By putting emphasis on such factors as the diversity of regional legal traditions going back to historical roots or the local resistance to legal provisions coming from the government level, he may even be regarded as a predecessor of today’s cultural comparative law giving priority to difference over similarity (cf. Pierre Legrand, Negative Comparative Law: A Strong Programme for a Weak Thought (Cambridge University Press 2022)).
Posted by Prof Balázs Fekete, Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Law, Budapest, Hungary
This piece belongs to Season 2 of the “Cross-jurisdictional dialogues in the Interwar period” series dedicated to less-known legal transfers which have had a palpable impact on the advancement of the law. The Interwar period was a time of disillusionment with well-established paradigms and legislative models, but also a time of hope in which comparative dialogue and exchange of ideas between jurisdictions thrived. The series is edited by Prof Yseult Marique (Essex University) and Dr Radosveta Vassileva (Middlesex University). To access the other pieces from this series, either select the ‘Interwar Dialogue’ category or click on the #Series_Interwar_Dialogue tag on the BACL Blog.
Suggested citation: B Fekete, ‘The Afterlife of Hungarian Private Law following the Treaty of Trianon – Miklós Ujlaki’s Critical Approach to Legal Unification’, BACL Blog, available at http://www.british-association-comparative-law.org/2024/07/12/the-afterlife-of-hungarian-private-law-following-the-treaty-of-trianon-miklos-ujlakis-critical-approach-to-legal-unification-by-balazs-fekete/
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