Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
1997
Publication Information
22 Law & Soc. Inquiry 829 (1997) (book review)
Abstract
On October 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) ceased to exist. On that celebrated day of German unity, the GDR incorporated itself into the legal and political system of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Economic and social union had taken place a few months earlier.' After 40 years, a people who had become accustomed to central planning, full employment, and state ownership of almost everything suddenly found themselves compacted into a profit-driven market economy rooted in private ownership. Equally swift was the legal revolution, for Unity Day witnessed the toppling of the GDR's judicial system, along with its superstructure of socialist legality, and its replacement by West German judicial institutions. The hurried changeover touched the lives of all GDR legal professionals-judges, prosecutors, lawyers, notaries, and law professors. What some of them encountered and felt in the overnight shift from a socialist legal system to a capitalist one is the subject of Inga Markovits's remarkable book, Imperfect Justice: An East-West German Diary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Recommended Citation
Donald P. Kommers,
Transitional Justice in Eastern Germany,
22 Law & Soc. Inquiry 829 (1997) (book review).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1390
