Right of the “Above” and the “Below”. On the Border of Customary Law and Custom: The Legal Customs

Abstract

Recalling certain aspects of the research on Hungarian legal ethnography, the study deals with the relationship between law, customary law and legal custom. Customs of law is a significant field of law, inherited from the ancient legal order and created in the feudal-order society, which existed at the border of custom and formal law. The importance of the living conditions it governed gave rise to the institution of community coercion, which gave its rules a legal character. Eventually, it evolved in the “below” space left to it from the “above” and over time it acquired a tenacity that made it capable of maintaining a legal system in competition with the state, in response to a regulatory question not accepted by “official law.” The compliance and adherence to legal customs was based on the conviction of a community recognizing the need to adopt established rules and not on the competence, prestige, authority, legislative power and privilege of a legislative body.