ACTA JURIDICA - A MTA Jogtudományi Közleményei Tom. 29 (1987)

1987 / 3-4. sz. - KULCSÁR KÁLMÁN: Position of lawyers and their role in the last four decades of Hungary

Position of lawyers in Hungary 307 finally in troubles in the functional consequences of the law. The political action against the lawyers and the "law practising", having characterized each voluntarist political regime, forced the lawyers, depending on the historical social conditions, to play the part of administrative civil-servants (which characterized in such cases also the exercise of jurisdiction) or—and, respectively,—reduced also simultaneously the number of lawyers. (It should be, however, noted that as a consequence of the structure of higher education of the traditional societies, the reduction of number was not at all inevitable in the preceding periods not even in case of overshadowing the juristic rationality.) The legislation similar to the Landrecht and by no means present only in late Prussia, however, promoted and promotes eventually everywhere the appearance of consequences disfunctional also for the political system. These two phenomena, apparently opposed to each other, have been throughout present with a certain continuity in the development of the societies of the East-Central-European region. Their effect on the social status of the lawyers manifested itself—under the influence of other phenomena, such as the cultural traditions, the legal culture connected with the development of law—to a certain extent in different ways in different countries. In Hungary, however, so to say all factors—hardly to be analyzed here—resulted in the increase of the numerical and social dominance of the lawyers up to the period of the Second World War. II. The changes in the social role of the lawyers have followed the evolution of the function of law—which may be characterized after all in the consolidation and perfection in case of all the three functions in the past four decades—with certain contradiction. The general basis of this contradiction is—beyond the above-mentioned phenomena but expressing also them—that in the traditional societies or even in the societies being in the early period of the modernization the structure according to "professions" of the intellectuals shows a particular picture. The professions of lawyers, clergymen, teachers are predominant, whereas the technical, economical professions and generally the professions connected with the up-to-date industrial and agrarian development represent a much more lower proportion. This speciality of the professional structure, however, handicaps not to a negligible extent the process of modernization. In Hungary the structure of the intellectual professions developed more or less like that in the period prior to the First World War and although between the two world wars considerable changes asserted themselves, the high number and proportion of people of legal education remained. On the contrary, already in 1949 the number of graduates of law considerably diminished. Taking the data of 1941 for 100, the number of graduates of law was 93.3 in 1949, at the same time, however,—not including the 2* Acta Juridica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. 29, 1987

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