"Ius publicum and ius privatum" in the Views of “Marxist” Romanists

Abstract

The concept of public and private law is still somewhat problematic, and the matter has also been subject to critical discussion in the legal literature in socialist states. It is commonly believed that the origin and idea of this division derive from Roman law. Socialist-oriented ideology generally left Roman law out of its legal system, rejecting the development of private property for the benefit of far-reaching state interference in private-law relationships, and any influence on the part of the legal system of a state that allowed slavery was inconsistent with the ideas of socialism. It was based on historical and dialectical materialism and was connected with the inevitable fight of classes in society. In socialist states, two tendencies in Roman law studies should be distinguished – “traditional” Roman law studies, referred to as “bourgeois”, and new “Marxist Roman law studies”. Some explorers of this tendency believed that it was only “Marxist Roman law studies that required further development, while “bourgeois Roman law studies”, in contrast to the former, could only provide a basis of information collected by its researchers. The negation of the division of law into public and private in Marxist ideology was not as obvious as it is commonly accepted. The paper presents, in a synthetic way, views of this topic given by some “Marxist” Romanists.