My first encounter with the intellectual legacy of Professor Artur Kozak was in 2012, that is - alas - three years after his death. Jakub Łakomy, then a PhD candidate (and now Assistant Professor) at the Department of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law at the University of Wrocław, whom I encountered at the Critical Legal Conference 2012, encouraged me to read Kozak's two major books: The Limits of Juristic Discretionary Power (2002) and Analytical Thinking in Legal Science and Juristic Practice (2010). For me, coming as I was from comparative legal history, it was not an easy read, but certainly a rewarding and illuminating one. Through Kozak, I came to appreciate the importance of social theory for law, and understood how important is legal theory for the legitimacy of dogmatic legal sciences. Kozak's vivid style, intellectual originality, colourful metaphor and bold syncretism (merging theorists who would be surprised by their intellectual bedfellows!) remain for me until today highly inspiring in terms of jurisprudential style and horizon.
As for Eugenijus Pašukanis (known to English-speaking readers as Evgeny Pashukanis), my first contact with his work was via the critical legal tradition, where he was rediscovered only some 45 years after his death. At first, I took Pašukanis for what he was commonly represented, i.e. a theorist of the withering away of the law and the author of an akward "commodity-form theory of the law" which, to be frank, does not sound very attractive, not least intellectually. Reading Pašukanis in English, both in the second-hand translation from the German by Barbara Einhorn, and in the direct but highly idiosyncratic translation included in John Hazard's edition of Soviet legal theorists, did not help either. Pašukanis seemed awkward, out of joint with jurisprudence and frankly rather useless. It was only when I came across the excellent Polish translation (1985) that I started to realize the depth of his thought and the originality of his approach. Thanks to Dr Gian Giacomo Fusco's invitation, I had the incentive to delve more deeply into Pašukanis and write a chapter on his understanding of the law & ideology nexus. This sparked a deeper interest in the Soviet jurist's thought, and currently I am working on two further pieces exploring his theory - one from the perspective of autonomy of the law (in Polish, currently under review in the Journal of the Polish Section of IVR), and another one, which I still need to write, on the relevance of Pašukanis for today's Law and Political Economy research thanks to the kind invitation of Dr Michał Stambulski.
‘Artur Kozak’s Juriscentrist Concept of Law: A Central European Legal Innovation.’ Review of Central and East European Law 45.2/3 (2020): 334-375. https://doi.org/10.1163/15730352-bja04502003 | academia
‘The place of legal tradition in Artur Kozak’s juriscentrist theory of law,’ Journal of Modern Science 47.2 (2021):227-244. https://doi.org/10.13166/jms/142746 |
© dr hab. Rafał Mańko