Interview with Zoltán Péteri, the First and Last Head of Department of Comparative Law of the Institute of Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The former – first and last – head of the Comparative Law Department of the Institute for State and Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as a researcher employed from the earliest period of the institution’s formation, Zoltán Péteri, was a witness to the development of the scientific profile and the international orientation of director Imre Szabó and his entire science policy. Due to Szabó’s personal weight in the Soviet Union, the situation of legal scholarship in these early socialist times in Hungary was rather privileged, different from that of other fields. This is a chronicle of the jurisprudential opening of the two hard decades of the Cold War between East and West, and of the development of comparative law. An account of a journey that was decided and able to preserve the academic demand of jurisprudence in spite of its Stalinist environment and to somewhat resolve the intellectual isolation of the region.