От обичай към закон
From Custom to Law

Summary/Abstract: The article brings to the fore the dependence of scientific knowledge on the concrete socio-political development and the influence exerted by scientific discourse on social practice. The theoretical problem concerning the importance of the scientific discourse as creating reality is considered on the basis of a concrete example: the debates on the right of inheritance at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. Both during that period and today, the problem of inheritance has been discussed within the frameworks of the broad international discourse about family forms and models. Within the frameworks of evolutionism, as a dominant conceptual and theoretical foundation at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, and in association with Herder’s ideas about the equal rights and independent development of peoples, the researchers’ interest has been directed to the relict legal customs and institutions as an expression of the specific popular spirit – mostly to the “zadruga” [patriarchal community] and the collective ownership characterising it. At the same time, traditional law is assessed to be the basis for the creation of modern, specific national legislation. A salient feature of Bulgaria’s development in the early decades after the establishment of a national state was the overlapping of the scholarly and the political elite. That made it necessary, in the interpretation of the Law on Inheritance of 1906, to bear in mind not only the importance of “tradition”, but also the influence of the scholars, supporters of the patriarchal community, who were simultaneously public figures and legislators. According to that 1906 Law on Inheritance, the male heirs received twice as much of the movables and real agricultural estate as the female heirs. The broad popularisation of certain ideas, the selective making of traditional practices into law and their enforcement by the state power, exerted essential influence on the formation of a definite legal awareness and collective conceptions.

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