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General Legal Theory

Századvég Edition

In this volume, I have attempted to develop a comprehensive theory of law. I have based the social theoretical starting points primarily on the theory of Niklas Luhmann and accordingly understood society as a conceptual-systemic construction of comprehensive reality. In contrast to him, however, I have also tried to include the structure of domination in society in my social theoretical synthesis and to take into account the supra-legal determination of the ruling groups at the level of society as a whole in my analysis of law. According to the starting point of Luhmann's theory, on the basis of physical and biological systems, sociality emerges as an independent system level through the mental systems of individuals. Here, only the intellect and its anchors provide the material for stable organisational structures. Reason, anchored in concepts, distinctions, patterns of action and norms, forms the specific material of society. This train of thought goes back to Dilthey and Husserl, but Luhmann combined this train of thought with theories of complex systems, and I have used it in this form in my theoretical work. However, I did not follow Luhmann's theoretical turn, who increasingly oriented his analyses towards an autopoietic concept of systems from the late 1970s onwards. With this turn, the stable structures of social formations were gradually pushed into the background in his writings and, in my opinion, a number of his earlier insights were lost. On the level of social theory, my distancing from Luhmann but my adherence to the insights of his early work is well illustrated by the analyses in the first volume, so that I did not need to go into them in more detail in this volume. My analyses of law in the narrower sense were published in the early 1990s in three volumes (Pokol 1991, 1994, 2000) as well as in smaller studies that unpacked the conceptual systematics of law and the inner layers of the complex legal system step by step. The first studies - still in the late 1980s - were based on Luhmann's theoretical sociology of law and his theory of legal dogmatics and were complemented in particular by the monographs of Karl Larenz and Josef Esser in their exploration of the inner structure of law. It was during this period that the concept of the multi-layered nature of law was formulated in my mind, and it was on this basis that I encountered the growing importance of constitutional fundamental rights in modern legal systems during my study trip to Germany in 1989. At that time, there was no constitutional jurisdiction in Hungary and we were struggling for its recognition during the transition to multi-party democracy, so in my first writings I tried to integrate fundamental rights harmoniously with the other layers of law. It was only when domestic constitutionalism reached a level of activism unparalleled anywhere in the world in the early 1990s that I began to better understand its inherent problems, and from then on, the excesses of fundamental rights at the expense of the other strata of law became more critical in my analyses. A deeper understanding of the internal struggles of American legal theory and the developments of the American "fundamental rights revolution" that threatened the law as a whole eventually shaped my reservations about activist fundamental rights jurisprudence in the course of my later research, which, while recognising the role of fundamental rights, are a constant feature of the analyses in this volume. My first summary of legal theory, entitled "The Theory of Law", was published by Rejtjel Publishing House in 2001, and my follow-up volume, "Sociological Studies in Law", was published by the same publisher in 2003. In writing the present volume, I have added the latter volume to the end of the earlier summary, which is justified by the fact that in my analyses I have not strictly separated the theoretical and sociological aspects of law and have tried to write a sociological theory of law. In this way, the fullness of the legal system can better unfold in this volume. However, in addition to the summary, I have made some changes to the text based on my research since then and added some small sections to the earlier analyses.