Sluhové dvou pánů?
Servants of Two Masters?

Humboldt University Law School in the Years 1945–1989

Summary/Abstract: "Diener zweier Herren: DDR-Juristen zwischen Recht und Macht" [Servants of Two Masters: GDR Lawyers Between Law and Power] written by German-born American legal scholar Inga Markovits, discusses the history of and everyday life at the Humboldt University Law School in Berlin between 1945 and 1989. Markovits examines the development of the East Berlin Law School and its teachers from three different perspectives. First, she traces the school’s adjustment to the communist dictatorship and its ideology, which was completed at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. Second, she seeks the signs of reluctance to make such adaptations. Third, she attempts to capture the declining belief in the idea of socialism and communism among the faculty and among lawyers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in general. According to Markovits, the GDR was not a state governed by the rule of law and its law did not necessarily create justice. However, it dampened arbitrariness and created an order within a non-democratic state in which justice could be exercised. According to the reviewer, the author did not sufficiently consider the exclusivity of the position of the East Berlin Law School, which resulted from both systemic and general factors. The monograph, however, is based on extensive source research and represents a serious, valuable, highly competent and stimulating contribution to the understanding of East German legal scholarship and its actors.

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