Sándor Krisztics's ideal of the rule of law - The ideal of constitutional governance

Abstract

With this short piece, I would like to pay tribute to the work of Ágnes Zsidai. I met her in person in the late 1980s. We were both speakers at a conference organized by the Faculty of Law of Eötvös Loránd University in late autumn 1988 to mark the centenary of Gyula Moór’s birth. In a rather small circle – if my memory serves me correctly, in the library of the then Department of Legal Theory – the presentations undertaken to reevaluate the scientific achievements of this undeservedly forgotten figure of 20th-century Hungarian jurisprudence in contrast to the canon of domestic „bourgeois” legal philosophy established by Imre Szabó. Ágnes Zsidai presented the legal-philosophical debate between Gyula Moór and Barna Horváth, which was the starting point for her later research, which focused on the life’s work of Barna Horváth and the legal-philosophical work of his student, István Bibó. Through all this, she made an indelible contribution to the research of the history of Hungarian legal philosophy in the decades following the change of regime. Her books and studies are indispensable sources for those interested in learning more about the subject.