Abstract. The critical assessment of the legacy of socialist jurisprudence is amongst one of the most difficult tasks of the post-transitory Central-European legal thinking. This study provides a critical reading of the findings of Hungarian socialist legal sociology with respect to the description and analysis of the socialist legal culture. The discussion starts with the first comprehensive empirical survey on the legal knowledge of the population, designed and carried out by Kálmán Kulcsár in 1965 and ends with András Sajó's synthesis on the nature of the Hungarian socialist legal culture elaborated in his monograph entitled Illusion and Reality in Law, published in 1986. The paper's main conclusion is that this two decades long 'golden age' of Hungarian legal sociology offers many valid points in both methodological and substantive terms contrary to the fact that the various findings were mainly elaborated under the pressure of official Marxism-Leninism.

Abstract. This article offers a case study from the "law and literature" perspective implying the presentation of the legal material of the Pusoma case, the drama written from it by Elemér Magyar, the documentary fi lm made from the case by Norbert Komenczi, and the fi lm adaptation of the drama directed by Ragályi Elemér. The study concludes with indicating the directions of the further multidisciplinary studies involving literary studies, forensic linguistics, legal anthropology, criminology and legal sociology.

‘Legal storytelling’ is one of the most contested area of the interdisciplinary research field of ‘law and literature’, which has taken shape in the political and legal context of the United States originally. The proponents of ‘legal storytelling’ endeavour to ‘give voice’ to groups and minorities of disadvantageous social position by ‘telling’ – by hearing and publicizing, in fact – their stories unheard by law. However, many lawyers doubt that these everyday life, often trivial, stories carry any legally relevant content, while literati question their aesthetical value. The essay argues against these doubts leaning on the material of focus group interviews recorded in a recent research on the Hungarians’ legal consciousness. It aims to expose the important role that these everyday life stories play in legal culture on the one hand, and, on the other hand, that the analysis of these uncanonised, not-belletristic texts could be fruitful indeed. For this, the first part of the essay offers a survey on how the concept of ‘legal culture’ emerged in Hungarian legal theoretical thinking, and how the sociological researches, in which the presented ordinary stories were recorded, connected to that. After analysing several story-bits taken from two focus group participants’ narrations, the attention turns to stories told by the ‘greats’, that is by writers, and here enters Franz Kafka in the scope. The last part of the essay seeks to determine what relates the two kinds – the ordinary and the literary – of narratives and what are the differences between them. For a conclusion, it emphasizes that this essay can be seen only as an intuitive theoretical experience for using aesthetic notions in analysing empirical sociological data rather than a methodologically well-founded application of that. The basic idea of this experiment is that both law and aesthetics are permeated by moral, and social psychological constituents.

No abstract

Abstract. This article discusses the position of legal anthropology among the legal sciences and its interdisciplinary character through the example of the socio-legal studies of the Hungarian Roma minority. The fi rst part illustrates the place of legal anthropology among the other legal and social disciplines, and its role in legal thinking, by the analysis of a practical question, "What can we do to improve the social position of the Hungarian Roma minority by legal means?" The second part considers the importance of legal anthropology in the Hungarian Roma studies, briefl y sketching the characteristics of the ethnological, sociological and cultural anthropological approaches. Finally, the article surveys the insights gained from the socio-legal studies of the Hungarian Roma minority over the last two decades. It highlights the inspiring results of legal anthropological studies, and also the diffi culties contemporary research has to face.