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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 50 > Issue 1 (1951)

 

Abstract

Here is an excellent and much needed book. Although the enthusiastic wishful thinking about things Russian, fashionable not so long ago, has for the most part abated, the rise of a new social and economic order on a great scale must call for careful study by lawyers and law-makers no less than by historians and economists and students of politics. Now that a generation has been at work constructively since the destructive era of militant communism after the revolution, we need accurate and objectively presented and interpreted information as to how the administration of justice goes on under "the dictatorship of the proletariat," whether or how far it shows what have been the characteristics of all rule by dictators, how the new problems created by the new order have been or are being met, how far what experience has shown to be the reasonable expectations incident to life in a civilized society are being met, and how extreme of bureaucratic adjustment of relations and ordering of conduct operates with respect to those expectations. One need not lay himself open to a charge of answering these questions in the way he puts them by speaking of "rights." At any rate, as Llewellyn has so well shown, any organization of mankind which fails to achieve an adjustment taking reasonable care of them sooner or later dissolves. These are the questions to which Dr. Gsovski's book is addressed, and he treats them understandingly, accurately, and with moderation, not with a brief for or against the Soviet legal order but as a thoughtful student of comparative law. In his own words, his method has been to "inquire into the legal protection and actual exercise of private rights in the Soviet Union, on the basis of an examination of the authentic soviet sources."

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