For the second time, the legal historians of the Faculty of Law of the University of Szeged participated in the international research group supported by the Visegrad Grant. The central topic of the project, which was implemented between 2021-2022, was the comparative study of the development of Polish, Czech and Hungarian legal systems between the two World Wars. The consortium project “(Dis)continuity of Legal Systems in Czechoslovakia, Hungary & Poland after WWII: Difficult Heritage”, launched in February 2024, focused on the Sovietisation of the legal systems of Central and Eastern European countries, but the methodology remained the same, as the socialist legislation was examined using the methodology of comparative law, in which the international conference organised in the framework of the project played a significant role. Five universities were involved in the research: the Jagellonian University and the University of Bialystok in Poland, the University of Trnava in Slovakia, the University of Trnava in the Czech Republic, the and the Hungarian Department of Legal History of the University of Szeged in Hungary.

The conference was held in the oldest building of the Jagellonian University, the stately 14th century Collegium Maius. The opening ceremony took place on 3rd February, where the opening speech was given by Prof. Maciej Mikuła, one of the consortium leaders of the project, reflecting on the importance of comparative methodology in the field of legal history. The first session (Law and Socialist State) focused on socialist constitutional law. The first session opened with a lecture by Prof. Piotr Fiedorczyk (University of Bialystok) on lawmaking in socialist countries, which focused on some of the specificities of socialist legislation, giving the audience a deeper insight into the shortcomings of prescriptive legislation and the role of Marxist ideology in legitimising it. This was followed by a presentation by Prof. Norbert Varga, Head of the Department of Hungarian Legal History (The Fundamental Rights of Citizens in Hungarian Socialist Constitutional Law), who spoke about the rights of citizens as declared in the Constitution of 1949, detailing the parliamentary debate on the law. The session was closed by Katarzyna Krzysztofek-Strzała’s lecture (Jagellonian University), also focusing on citizens' rights (Selected Fundamental Rights in Polish Constitution of 1952), thus revealing the parallels and similarities between Polish-Hungarian constitutional history in the socialist period.

In the next session (Law and Justice Part I), Prof. Vilém Knoll and Marián Byszowiec gave a joint presentation (“Socialist Legality” and Interference in th Independence of the Judiciary in the 1950s) on the relationship between socialist legality and judicial independence, with a special analysis of how socialist criminal law and criminal procedure became a tool illegalities committed by the state authorities. Closely related to this topic Benedek Varga (PhD student at the Department of Hungarian Legal History) presented his research findings, examining how socialist legislation destroyed the main principle of substantive criminal law, presenting this topic through archival economic crimes cases (The codification of socialist criminal law with special regard to economic crimes). The first day of the conference was closed by the Law and Justice Part II panel, which focused on different procedural topics: Transformations of Civil and Criminal Procedural Law 1948-1960), followed by Jakob Maziarz (Jagellonian University), who analysed the dismantling of judicial independence in the socialist era (System of Legal Protection Authorities in the People's Republic of Poland).

One of the central themes of the second day of the conference was the relationship between law and the socialist planned economy. The first lecture was given by Peter Dostalík (Palacký University in Olomouc/ University of West Bohemia), who gave a detailed presentation on the regulation of joint-stock companies in communist Czechoslovakia, followed by a presentation of Dénes Legeza (National Intellectual Property Office), who analysed the Sovietisation of copyright. Máté Pétervári (Senior lecturer, Department of Hungarian Legal History, also analysed the influence of socialist planned economy on the law (The Influence of Socialist Rearrangement on the Hungarian Insolvency Law), showing how bankruptcy law was transformed from a legal instrument for the protection of creditors to an an instrument for nationalisation. The economic session was closed by Marek Strzała (Jagellonian University), who analysed the legal aspects of agricultural collectivisation in the period.

After the session on the law-economy relationship, a panel on family law followed where the first speaker was Prof. Mária Homoki-Nagy (Professor of the Hungarian Department of Legal History), who presented the transformation of marriage law in the post-1945 period (Marriage and divorce in Hungary after 1945), presenting the changes in this area of law on the basis of specific archival sources. This was followed by a presentation by Miriam Laclavíková and Ingrid Lanczová (University of Trnava), who spoke about the codification of socialist family law in post-war Czechoslovakia, followed by Denisa Kotroušová’ presentation (University of West Bohemia, Pilsen), who gave a detailed lecture about the Czech inheritance law in the context of property and family law. The session was concluded by a presentation of Paweł Kaźmierski (Jagiellonian University/University of Jena), who presented some problems of marriage law in Poland between 1944 and 1950, based on archival research.

All members of the research team will publish their research results in a special issue of the journal Cracow Studies of Constitutional and Legal History.In addition to the conference, the project has also produced a collection of texts in English on the sources of Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Polish law from 1945-1989, which will be published in the IURA online database, thus contributing significantly to the understanding of the differences and parallels between socialist legislation in the international context,