Law and Informal Practices: The Post-communist Experience
Denis James Galligan, Marina
Kurkchiyan - Oxford University Press, 2003
Law and Informal Practices is a work in
socio-legal studies, examining the functions and effectiveness of law in the
countries of the former Soviet Union. As the transition away from communism
enters its second decade, the countries involved are confronted by an apparent
failure of law. Understanding the newly formed social order in which law is
powerless is a challenge to the assumptions of western jurisprudence. The
contributors to this book take up that challenge. Using the framework of
contemporary theory, ten specialists in different aspects of social science
analyse the status of post-communist law from a variety of perspectives. Their
emphasis is on the interplay between law and social norms, informal practices,
and human values. Their work contributes to several of the wider ongoing debates
in socio-legal studies: on the rule of law and its role in maintaining social
order; on the interaction between law and social norms, relation between
legitimacy and legality; and on the relative merits of solving problems by
informal means such as networking or the use of intermediaries rather than by
formal, institutionalised processes. At the same time, the book is intended to
meet the needs of those interested not just in law but in the post-communist
region. Blending theory with case studies, each contributor focuses on a single
sector, such as the political system, worker-management relations, human rights,
the machinery by which law is made and implemented, or the cultural and
historical background of the societies under consideration. The majority of the
chapters draw directly upon the authors' own experience and empirical research
