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

306 К. Kulcsár Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794, of the legal "monster" of the Prussian absolutism as follows: "It was first the completely developed enlightened despotism which tried consciously from the 18th century to get rid of the specific formal legal logics developed only here all the world of the (German) national law, as well as of its brain-workers of university education. The bureaucracy—in its self-imposed evolution and in the naive belief of knowing better everything—developed a general rationalism having therein a decisive part. The essentially patriarchal political regime turns into the type of the welfare state and is not at all concerned about the concrete volition of the interested parties and about the formalism of the educated legal mentality. It would have fully eradicated this professional mentality with the greatest pleasure." In respect of the linear relationship of the political decision, the law and the observance of law, neither the following part referring to the above characterized aspect of the critics of Max Weber is of minor interest. "Since the law has to get rid of its professional legal quality and has to develop so that not only the civil servants but first of all the employees could exhaustively learn from it without foreign help their legal position." Therefore "Just the diametrically opposite to the feudal state of the "subjective law" the "objective law" of the Prussian Landrecht is predominantly the world of legal obligations."3 The consequence of this phenomenon is again the relative independence of the lawyers as a professional group from the development of the function of law, in this case, however, of its intentional function. That is easy to understand: if the paternal policy sets itself the direct shaping of the society as an object, namely with the direct regulation comprising nearly everything of the conduct of citizens—more precisely here, of subjects—merely this fact is a phenomenon opposed to the juristic rationality. For a policy of such kind and for the legal regulation resulting therefrom the lawyer— with his professional knowledge, with his striving after the enforcement of values, principles, methods characterizing the legal means from the very first a disagreeable, disturbing element. Therefore, every such policy aims at the "colloquial" formulation of legal rules, at the unambiguousness, at the elimination of professional elements, namely on the supposition that the legal rules, becoming in this way intelligible for everybody, ensure already the observance, too. The illusory character of this endeavour is proved, however, by all investigations of legal knowledges since the people generally do not read legal rules, they resort very rarely to direct sources for legal knowledge and even if they know the essence of the legal rules, this concerns predominantly the legal regulation relating to the stable values, so to say to the traditional values, expressing, however, mostly the legal consciousness connected therewith and not a real legal knowledge. The evolution of the intellectual stratum of lawyers promoted therefore not only the relative autonomy of the law as social phenomenon, but increased also its inherent rationality4 the surrender of which results 3 WEBER, M .: Legal sociology, in: Jog és Filozófia (Law and Philosophy), Budapest, 1981. pp. 158— 4 WEBER, M.: Rechtssoziologie, Neuwied, 1960. pp. 196. et seq. Acta Juridica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 29, 1987 159.

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