Legal Systems
Socialist Law
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Socialist law is the general type of legal system used in communist and formerly communist states, structurally based on the civil-law system with major modifications and additions from Marxist-Leninist ideology. Its theoretical foundation traces to Lenin, who treated law and the state as instruments of coercion, developed further by theoreticians Peteris Stucka, Dmitry Kursky and Nikolai Krylenko. Despite the ideological superstructure, socialist states preserved the formal criteria of the Romano-Germanic civil law, which is the crux of a live scholarly dispute over whether socialist law ever constituted a genuinely separate legal system.
Facts
Origin Year1917 marks the Russian Revolution and the earliest Soviet legal theorizing under Lenin; the sources give no single codification year for socialist law as a type. Example JurisdictionsSoviet Union, China, Cuba 1 Primary Source of LawState-enacted codes and statute, subordinated to the authority of the supreme state organ of power 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The 1922 RSFSR Civil Code is a defining founding instrument of Soviet socialist law.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.