SOCIALIST LAW

also called Soviet law, the law derived from the system of public order devised by early Soviet leaders after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Soviet model was subsequently emulated in those parts of the world where Communist parties became dominant, ranging from eastern Europe to Central and Southeast Asia and from the Caribbean to some parts of Africa. Socialist law took somewhat different forms in these countries because of differences in their prerevolutionary legal systems, which often were an amalgam of religious, customary, and received or imposed civil law. The immediate legal background of Socialist law in the Soviet Union and the eastern European Socialist countries was the Romano-Germanic system. For this reason and because Soviet law itself was much influenced by the civil-law tradition, some legal scholars have classified Socialist law as a subdivision of civil law. They have pointed out that, while the rules of substantive law in Socialist countries were influenced in varying degrees by the principles of Marxism and Leninism, the rules of civil and criminal procedure, the conceptual apparatus of the law, and the legal methodology were still essentially civilian. Guyana and Tanzania are notable exceptions because they are the only Socialist countries to have had a common-law background. Other scholars, including Socialist jurists, have claimed an independent status for Socialist law. In their view, Socialist systems were distinguished from other legal systems by the influence of state ownership of the principal means of production, the special role that the Communist Party played in the legal system, the close relationship between the legal system and national economic planning, the denial of any distinction between public and private law, and, perhaps above all, a conception of the role of law as an instrument for restructuring society, shaping the new order, and dismantling the old. The claim that Socialist law constituted a separate legal family was recognized in practice after World War II when judges representing the Soviet legal system were elected to the International Court of Justice in accordance with requirements of the International Court's statute (article 9) that the court had to include judges who are representative of the main forms of civilization and of the principal legal systems. Additional reading For a comprehensive survey of the Soviet legal system, see William E. Butler, Soviet Law (1983). Harold J. Berman, Justice in the U.S.S.R.: An Interpretation of Soviet Law, rev. ed. (1963), is a study of Soviet law to the end of the Khrushchev era against the backdrop of Russian legal history and Marxist philosophy. The relationship of Soviet law to other Socialist legal systems is treated in John N. Hazard, Communists and Their Law: A Search for the Common Core of the Legal Systems of the Marxian Socialist States (1969). The effect of sociopolitical change on Soviet legal developments is discussed in John N. Hazard, Managing Change in the U.S.S.R. (1983). John N. Hazard, William E. Butler, and Peter B. Maggs, The Soviet Legal System: The Law in the 1980's (1984), presents original source materials and contains an extensive bibliography. The constitutions of Socialist legal systems are translated with introductions in William B. Simons (ed.), The Constitutions of the Communist World (1980, reissued 1984).