Inga Markovits

Justice in Luritz: Experiencing Socialist Law in East Germany

Acknowledgments ix CHAPTER 1: The Files 1 CHAPTER 2: The Beginning 8 CHAPTER 3: People 16 CHAPTER 4: Property 26 CHAPTER 5: Work 42 CHAPTER 6: Families 69 CHAPTER 7: Punishments 92 CHAPTER 8: The Party 141 CHAPTER 9: Hopes and Lies 182 CHAPTER 10: The End 219 Notes 243

Transitions to Constitutional Democracies: The German Democratic Republic

All law reform must look for local precedents to build on. Does this claim also apply to formerly totalitarian states? Building on her research on East German legal history, the author asks whether there might be some generally applicable reasons explaining why in the German Democratic Republic the first tender shoots of a rule of law appeared before the collapse of socialism. She finds an inverse relationship between political and legal faith: as one declines, the other rises, and vice versa. The waning of utopian hopes tends to be compensated for by an increased interest in law and rights and by the growing professionalism of a disenchanted legal class. The author believes that not only is the “prerogative state” a constant threat to the “normative state,” but that, vice versa, the practice of legality, even the legality of totalitarian state, can threaten and undermine the effectiveness of autocratic rule.

Two Truths about Socialist Justice: A Comment on Kommers: [Commentary]

Talk about former socialist legal systems and their postsocialist paths to reform, and sooner or later, you will find yourself talking about historical guilt. How could one avoid it? The spectacle of judges now themselves being judged for socialist miscarriages of justice, of prosecutors now prosecuted for serving the Party more than the law, forces upon us the question of how it could happen that legal systems that had set out to create a more just and brotherly world ended up by forgetting and betraying their own best hopes. Who is to blame?