Faglunsj: Special Issue

In the Special Issue, different aspects of institutions, change, and path dependency are explored, based on the workshop on The Breaking Point of Legal Institutions¡ªContinuities and Discontinuities, held at the University of Oslo in November 2019. The papers are multidisciplinary in the intersection between law, legal theory, legal history, and sociology of law. Each article employs the standard tools of legal analysis on the legal material to study the effects of communism in selected countries. Some articles analyze the concept of law and explore possible criteria for determining circumstances where the law was suspended. Some focus on empirical studies by searching for evidence of the courts on trials in political cases and evidence of rulings in political cases. This Special Issue focuses primarily on how judicial institutions were affected through decisions and policies either within the judiciary or outside the judicial structure. Each article tracks the development of judicial institutions in the communist country and analyzes the remnants of this process in the current judiciary today.