A CENTURY OF PHILOSOPHY OF LAW AT THE FACULTY OF LAW IN BELGRADE (1841–1941)
A CENTURY OF PHILOSOPHY OF LAW AT THE FACULTY OF LAW IN BELGRADE (1841–1941)

Summary/Abstract: Philosophy of law has always had a prominent role and important place at the Belgrade Faculty of Law, since its very establishment. Over time, its idea has undergone many transformations, which confirmed its wealth, its thematic diversity. That helped to fortify awareness of the unbreakable connection between law and philosophy, as well as of the need for the legal philosophical education of the Serbian young jurists. Belgrade Faculty of Law, still is a true hotspot of legal philosophical thought, its development and enhancement always had its ear on relevant events and the mainstream of European legal philosophy, trying to provide something new and original in the process. As a whole, the philosophy of law cultivated at тхат Faculty constitutes a high-class spiritual legacy – not as a stone monument that should be visited and bowed before from time to time, but rather as a living, effective heritage which should constantly be returned to in dialogical reconsideration, interpretation and evaluation. The philosophy of law at Belgrade’s Faculty of Law is as old as the Faculty itself. If someone would, perchance, doubt that fact, of the utmost cultural, historical, spiritual, scientific, pedagogical and educational importance, it would be enough to remind them that Jovan Sterija Popović (1806–1856) at the very source of legal studies in Serbia (1840/1841), i.e. at the very beginnings of the then-Legal Department of the Lyceum and subsequently the Faculty of Law, gave lectures under the title Natural Law. Sterija perceived natural law as eternal, general and unchangeable. It is the pattern for positive law. From the point of view of the individual, law according to Sterija is primarily “permission,” that is the moral capacity of acting toward other individuals. Soon after Sterija, Dimitrije Matić (1821–1884), his former student, in 1848 became a professor of “domestic law.” Three years later (1851), he published a text in the Herald of the Serbian Letter and Wisdom Society entitled “A brief overview of the historical development of the principles of law, morality and state, from the olden days to our time,” in which he also presented his own extremely liberal legal philosophical views. The core of his interpretation of law, his guiding idea, was freedom. Moreover, he equalized law and freedom and developed his own legal philosophical point of view on that (Hegelian) basis. After Sterija and Matić, with whom Philosophy of Law flourished at the Faculty, the second half of the 19th century brought “low tide.” Nevertheless, legal philosophical questions were discussed within the Encyclopaedia of Law. Gligorije Geršić (1842–1918) provides a nice example for that. Although he predominantly dealt with private law in the broadest sense of the word, Živojin Perić (1868–1953), diving down to the very core of law, reached his legal philosophical standpoint which is dominated by the idea of law and legality. Perić raised respect for the law as a rational creation so high that he turned it into a moral duty. In addition to legality, and thereby legal security as a value in and of itself, Perić cared equally about individual rights, and added pacifism to the mix, dismissing the use of violence both without and within. In the first few decades of the 20th century, Paris was the meeting place of a considerable number of young Serbian jurists, who earned doctoral titles at the Sorbonne by defending highly valuable and notable doctoral dissertations. Among them were some who devoted their theses to the big questions of philosophy and legal theory, and later went on to become teachers at Belgrade Faculty of Law. Distinguished figures in this group were Živan Spasojević (1874–1938), Božidar S. Marković (1903–2002) and Radomir D. Lukić (1914–1999). In his Paris thesis (1911), Spasojević discussed the problem of analogy and interpretation, proposing a truly thorough solution: abandonment of the traditional definition of law. Law should be seen as a sociological creation filled with purpose. Božidar S. Marković in his 1930 Paris thesis, dedicated to the relationship before the term justice and the development of positive private law, developed a vitalistic concept of justice derived from a central principle of Spinoza’s philosophy. No less successful and provocative was 25-year-old Radomir D. Lukić, when in his 1939 Paris thesis on the obligatory power of legal norm and the problem of objective law he dealt with one of the key legal philosophical problems, the problem of law–value, law–ideal, i.e. objective law. He returned to that problem half a century later and considered it in a systematic manner. Aspects of philosophy of law, touching on or even partial processing of certain legal philosophical themes can also be found with former professors of Belgrade Law Faculty for whom philosophy of law was not at the very center of their interest. On this occasion the names of our faculty “Russians” – Fyodor Taranovsky (1875–1936) and Evgeny Spektorsky (1875–1951) should also be mentioned. One of the greatest representatives of legal philosophical thought at Belgrade Law Faculty between the two world wars was Đorđe Tasić (1892–1943). Refusing to accept firm boundaries between the disciplines dealing with the origin and essence of law, its purpose and value – and they are theory, sociology and philosophy of law – in many of his works he searched for a comprehensive approach to the legal phenomenon. No one has disputed yet the opinion that at the very summit of the legal philosophical legacy of the Faculty, or to be more specific: at the very summit of Serbian philosophy of law so far, is Toma Živanović (1884–1971). That opinion and that assessment are firmly based in the fact that Živanović, who with his tripartition introduced an important novelty in the science of criminal law, managed an autonomous accomplishment in the philosophy of law as well, to develop and complete an entire legal philosophical system. Živanović obviously started from the notion that philosophy of law must have two main characteristics: systematicity and syntheticity. His synthetic philosophy of law is an unusually complex and branched out spiritual creation – a logical structure consistently executed by the method of generalizing abstraction. Its goal is to systematically and synthetically encompass not only the whole of law, but knowledge of it, too. Hence the idea of its duality, i.e. division into philosophy of law and philosophy of legal sciences, as the guiding idea of Živanović’s legal philosophy. Each of them is accompanied by science. Therefore: philosophy of law, science of philosophy of law, philosophy of legal sciences, science of philosophy of legal sciences. Furthermore, the science of a common genus of philosophy of law and philosophy of legal sciences, i.e. science of synthetic philosophy of law proved to be necessary. Radomir Lukić, to an extent, went down the same path in the philosophy of law as Toma Živanović. He and Živanović shared the belief that philosophy of law needed to be systematic, to be developed and presented in the form of a system. However, the difference between them lies in the fact that Lukić thought philosophy of law had to be preceded by a system of general philosophy whence it should emanate and be indistinguishably connected with, which was not the case with Živanović. That is why in his twilight years he undertook constructing such a system as the presumption and condition of philosophy of law. From that effort, from long and persistent work, came Lukić’s System of Philosophy of Law, published in 1992. In line with the initial idea, it consists of two parts. The first showcases Lukić’s philosophy in general, while the second presents his philosophy of law. There is no need to go into Lukić’s general philosophy here, especially not his ontology of the real world, the backbone of which is the teaching of the triune (matter, energy and spirit). It is enough to focus on his philosophy of law, and that too, of course, in a completely summary way. Like his general philosophy, Lukić’s philosophy of law is also divided into three disciplines: ontology, axiology and gnoseology of law. The first of the three aforementioned is the most important. There Lukić returned to the same question that had consumed him in his youth, during the making of his Paris thesis on objective law. In accordance with the supra-experiential orientation of the philosophy of law, objective law personifies a special legal supra-experience and thus exclusively belongs to the “subject” of the philosophy of law. That law, as harmonious order stemming from the essence of the world and connected with its goal, is the privileged field of legal philosophy. Defined by the essence of the world, objective law is to an even greater extent defined by the goal of the world which is also the supreme value. If Lukić found that goal in the existence and sustenance of the biggest possible number of as perfect as possible beings, primarily people, in their individual perfection, in the complete development of all characteristics of their nature, then objective law is the means to that end, then it contains the norms and rules which enable the most complete achievement of the goal of the world.

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