Vítězslav Sommer Experti, právo a socialistický stát Právní věda v ČSAV a její činnost v letech 1952–1960
Experts, the Law, and the Socialist State: Jurisprudence at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1952–60

Summary/Abstract: This article is concerned with the formation of the culture of experts, which played an important role in the process of shaping institutions and mechanisms of government in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. The author explores how Czechoslovak legal theorists continuously intervened in the process of ‘building Socialism’. He begins by considering the development of the institutional basis of jurisprudence in the structure of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Using the example of the Institute of State and Law at the Academy, he demonstrates how social-science institutions were created to meet the demands of new, socialist scholarship, and also to demonstrate the growing importance that expert knowledge had for State Socialist government. In the second part of the article, he considers debates about the ‘Czechoslovak revolution’ and ‘people’s democracy’, providing insight on the theoretical basis of Socialist scholarship on the State and law. The debates, which lasted several years, demonstrated that a key area of disagreement was the question of adapting Marxist-Leninist theory to Czechoslovak conditions and Czechoslovak historical experience. It was also clear from the debates that the most important form of Socialist government was, in the theorists’ view, the Socialist State as an institutional consequence of revolutionary transformation and the indubitable organizational framework of people’s democracy. The last part of the article discusses legal theorists as experts and considers their role in the framing of the ‘Socialist Constitution’ of 1960.

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