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Popular Use of Yugoslav Labor Courts and the Contradiction of Social Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Robert M. Hayden
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Abstract

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A basic tenet of communist legal theory is that the judicial function should be socialized, that is, executed by laymen rather than by professional judges. Social courts have been created in all of the Eastern European socialist countries to fulfill this mandate. However, the little empirical evidence available on the use of these courts indicates that they are rarely used voluntarily by individuals, but rather are primarily instruments of state social control over individuals.

The major exception to this pattern of use is exhibited by the Yugoslav version of social labor courts, the Courts of Associated Labor (hereafter CAL). These courts are heavily used, and over 90 percent of their cases are brought by individual workers. This paper discusses why the CAL are attractive to individual workers, drawing on ethnographic research in the trial CAL in Belgrade and on the political arguments surrounding a 1982 parliamentary effort to “reform” the CAL out of effective existence. The basic conclusion is that the CAL are successful in attracting individual workers as litigants because they are not really social courts. Further, it is suggested that the idea of social courts is contradictory: Such courts can offer little to most members of society, but instead are even more prone than regular courts to be used as mechanisms for social control by politically powerful elites.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , 1986 , pp. 229 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

The research reported in this paper was supported at various times by the Fulbright Exchange Program with Yugoslavia, the National Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences Program (Grant No. SES-8409554) and the American Bar Foundation. This support is acknowledged with thanks. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Wenner-Gren Foundation International Symposium on “Ethnohistorical Models of the Evolution of Law in Specific Societies,” in Bellagio, Italy, August 10-18, 1985; I am grateful for the comments of my colleagues at that symposium. I would also like to thank John Comaroff, Sally Engel Merry and Eric Steele for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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