Administering Justice — Without State Courts1

Abstract

Many of the drafts and notes of Ernő Szücs Tárkány are in manuscript, and they can offer valuable clues for European legal ethnography. One of them is a manuscript by Tárkány Szücs, both in Hungarian and English, in the Archives of the Institute of Ethnology of the Research Centre for the Humanities, dated 1982 and titled Administering Justice — without State Courts, which has been awaiting publication for forty years. This study is an important milestone, as it demonstrates, based on a broad international perspective, that even in a field that was monopolized by the state very early on, such as administering justice, legal customs have survived to a great extent; and that legal ethnographic approaches make it possible to arrive at valid conclusions of practical importance through an expert comparison of legal phenomena that are distinct in time and space but have common characteristics. The English-language version of the study is being published verbatim (first publication).