The university is one of the most essential, central institutions of any human society. In 1872, in the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Cluj/Kolozsvár, Transylvania’s capital, one of the founding faculties of the new Franz Joseph University, was the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, where the language of legal education was Hungarian. The tradition of legal education goes back to 1581 when a short-lived university was founded, but the much more permanent legal education started in 1733 in the protestant college, and in 1774, at the Catholic Legal Academia founded by empress Maria Theresa. 1872 marked the foundation of the first modern university in Transylvania, with a renowned staff of professors as well.
After WWI, the multiethnic Transylvania, and its “capital,” Cluj/Kolozsvár was annexed to Romania. Making use of the infrastructure of the Franz Joseph University (which had moved to Budapest for a short period and then was relocated permanently to Szeged, Hungary) in 1919 the King Ferdinand I University was founded in Cluj/Kolozsvár; the language of legal education became exclusively Romanian.
Based on the facts presented above, a simple rule can be set up: the language of legal education depends on whoever exercises sovereignty over Transylvania. The same rule prevailed between 1940 and 1944 as well: when Northern Transylvania, and with that, Cluj/Kolozsvár was returned to Hungary under the Second Vienna Award, the university that returned from Szeged to Cluj/Kolozsvár provided legal education only in Hungarian, while the Romanian university moved to Sibiu/Nagyszeben, to Southern Transylvania which remained under Romanian sovereignty.
According to the 1942 analysis of Gyula László (1910–1998), professor of archaeology, the Romanians after the First World War immediately realized that Cluj/Kolozsvár required something different from a regular university: “Cluj/Kolozsvár was an intellectual border fortress and bastion. The Romanian university in Cluj/Kolozsvár set as its goal the research of the Romanian life, especially the research of Transylvania’s Romanian nature, and the permanent international publication of the results. There is no doubt that parts of this work had significant results from the international point of view as well (e.g., the pioneering work of the Romanian language atlas). From their point of view, they did a perfect job, and the state did not spare any money or other types of support to serve the great cause” [2: 464–465]. Gyula László criticized the situation of the Franz Joseph University, of the institution which has moved back to Cluj/Kolozsvár in 1940 under the Second Vienna Award in order to create a comprehensive development program. “If contrasted with the Franz Joseph University, the first thing to be noted is that it did not differ in any way from the structure based on humanities of the other universities in Hungary. It could be freely moved to any Hungarian territory, as its organization does not express in any way the fact that it protects a fortress and builds a bastion” [2: 465].
The Second Vienna Award proved to be a temporary settlement, and the implementation of Gyula László’s program (for example, the founding of the Department of the History of Transylvania and the Department of the History of Hungarian Settlements, the launch of coordinated research programs) did not take place.
This short analysis shows that both the Romanians and the Hungarians saw the university as the main instrument in attaining their own national goals in Transylvania. “Our own university” is was perceived not only as a question of language but that of control as well: the university is a framework where research programs can be directed and coordinated to serve national purposes. Thus, between 1872 and 1919, only the Hungarian, between 1919 and 1940, only the Romanian, while between 1940 and 1944, only the Hungarian was the language of university-level education in Cluj/Kolozsvár.
There is a surprising change to this fact in 1945: an exception under the historical rule. In 1944–1945 Transylvania was reunited under Romanian sovereignty. The Romanian university moved back from Sibiu/Nagyszeben to Cluj/Kolozsvár. However, in parallel, a university with Hungarian as the language of instruction was founded on June 1, 1945, receiving the name Bolyai in December to honor two Transylvanian mathematicians, father and son, Farkas Bolyai (1775–1856) and János Bolyai (1802–1860). The university also included the Faculty of Legal and Economic Sciences. The question arises: does this mean that one of the critical issues of the nationalist rivalry between Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania was at least partially concluded on a positive note? Those who are familiar with the situation also know that the answer is, unfortunately, negative.
How did and how could the Bolyai University in Cluj/Kolozsvár be established in 1945? It was the result of circumstances and politics. However, it was not created by an organic political agreement, nor by the free will of the new, post-war government of the country that aimed to settle the situation of national minorities in a positive note. The existence of the Bolyai University is due to an exceptional, unusual situation, and its path—as we shall see—inevitably turned in the direction of dissolution, its virtual termination in 1959 (trough the merger with the Romanian university and cessation of the Hungarian language legal education, marking the return of legal education to the linguistic monism prevailing before 1945).
The first reason for this detour from the historical routine was that the Hungarian university that was moved back from Szeged to Cluj/Kolozsvár in 1940 was not closed. On September 14, 1944, Sándor Vita, a moderate politician, formulated a short letter signed by several leading Hungarian politicians and intellectuals in support of the Hungarian university. The letter is addressed to Dezső Miskolczy, professor of medicine, rector of the university: “Being aware of our responsibility towards Hungarian-language science and culture in Transylvania, we turn to your Magnificence to consider the importance of the continuance of the century-long cultural life of the Transylvanian Hungarians, and convince the Council of the Hungarian University of Transylvania not to let themselves influenced by anything and anyone—even while trying to escape the threat of war and within the limits of their possibilities—in their determination to keep the five faculties and the departments of the university in Cluj/Kolozsvár” [2: 488]. Thus, despite the evacuation order, the university stayed in Cluj/Kolozsvár. In a period where the territorial status of (Northern) Transylvania was not officially decided yet, Romanian politics was under pressure, as they had to collaborate with the Soviets who, on their behalf, were skilfully manipulating the Transylvanian issue in order to achieve their goals. In such a context, the full removal of the university was not an acceptable step. In this historical ambiance, we should interpret the decree of King Michael I issued on May 28, 1945, regarding the establishment of a new university with Hungarian as the language of instruction, on June 1, 1945. This was a covert, but a politically defensible step to formally terminate the activity of the Franz Joseph University: the establishment of a new institution.
Therefore, the approach that links the foundation of Bolyai University with a real decrease of Romanian nationalism is wrong. Such swift and fast ideological enlightenment did not happen and was not possible. Short-term political goals were much more significant than the long-term settling of the national minority issue.
The second reason, however, is the left-wing idealism of some Transylvanian Hungarians, which I consider a serious factor. In essence, the Hungarian leftists believed that the existence of this university as justified, and its creation after WWII was natural and self-evident. They also began to act in this spirit. This action is also one of the factors of the creation of the university. The closing of the university in 1959 was a massive disappointment to Hungarian communists and other the leftists who supported the system. The idealistic left-wing activists were mere tools in the hands of the dictatorship, and this idealism caused them even some years in prison.
As the foundation of the Bolyai University was the result of circumstances, it was not a desired and wanted institution, but a tolerated one. It was established with extraordinary difficulties (the returning Romanian university took the buildings, collections, student houses over). It could have even be predicted that its fate was sealed. The possibility of the 1959 merger was encoded into its establishment. Nevertheless, the independent Bolyai University functioned, more exactly was able to function for 14 years.Footnote 4 Much research needs to be conducted to have a full and precise picture of the university’s history: Romanian and even Russian archives could hold significant surprises. Researching the archives can provide information, for example, on how the founding of the Bolyai University was seen in Bucharest in 1945, on the role of legal professionals in the dictatorship.
It is not a goal to paint an idealized picture of this university with a symbolic weight and value to the Hungarians of Transylvania. From 1945 onwards, Romania witnessed the unfolding of a totalitarian dictatorship that replaced the diversity of ideas with the forced domination of only one idea: the very much mundane distorted images of utopian communism, that is, Leninism and Stalinism. In its first years, a typical university, from 1947 it was transformed into a so-called Marxist university. The highly respected and admired teachers from Hungary (such as László Buza, professor of public international law and György Bónis, professor of legal history) who used to work at the Franz Joseph University were sent back to Hungary against their will. Legal education had political goals: the old “cadres,” especially judges and prosecutors, had to be replaced with lawyers educated in the spirit of the new Soviet-type system. Bourgeois judges and prosecutors were remnants of a bygone age and needed to be replaced because of their untrustworthiness. Lawyers educated in the new spirit were meant to implement socialist justice, sentence people to death, or conduct show trials. György Fekete (1911–2002), professor of civil law, for instance, starts his book on the general theory of civil law published in 1958 with the following text. “Soviet armed forces crushed German and Japanese fascist armies and thus made it possible for several European and Asian states to break the chains of imperialism forever” [4: 2].
Ideology impregnated education. The condition of every professor’s appointment was the loyalty to the system, and the professors were scrutinized continuously. Nevertheless, several waves of layoffs took place; some professors were even sent to jail. For example, even the committed communist János Demeter (1908–1988), professor of constitutional law, was in jail for political reasons between 1952 and 1955.
After the 1956 uprising and revolution in Hungary demanding the end of Soviet rule and as a consequence of its defeat, in Transylvania, the fragile and informal political compromise between leftist Romanians and Hungarians failed, and one of the anticipated signs and proofs of this failure was the merger of the two universities in Cluj/Kolozsvár. The 1959 merger, decided by the communist party (by its official name in this period: Romanian Workers Party), ended the history of the Bolyai University. Szabédi László, one of the university professors who committed suicide, sent his final note to the county party committee secretary.Footnote 5
The letter says the following: “With the occasion of the meeting regarding the merger of the two universities, I was convinced that I was surrounded by informant eyes and ears… The only goal of my life was the happiness of the working class (the working people), and communism is where our People’s Republic is heading towards. Long live the bright future of the socialist world!”[5: 303–304].
A part of the professors at the law school of the Bolyai University was transferred to the merged university. However, no new Hungarian speaking teachers were employed at the Law Faculty. The transferred professors of the former Bolyai University continued to teach in the Romanian language. While in the case of other specialties, we can speak about the survival of the Bolyai University inside the newly merged entity, this is not the case of legal education, where continuity was disrupted. In fact, the merger was a return to the original rule that connected the language of legal instruction directly to the one exercising sovereignty. Hungarian language legal education, which by its nature had a prominent long-term anti-regime (anti-communist) potential, was closed. The Romanian political rulers perceived that the ideas of the 1956 Hungarian Anticommunist Revolution are widespread among Hungarians in Romania, and the Bolyai University with its intellectual base can be a core of anti-communist thinking. The fall of the Bolyai University meant the end of the central and representative Hungarian intellectual center in Transylvania.
The graduates of the Bolyai University have accomplished outstanding professional performances in a variety of legal fields. The lawyer graduates of the Bolyai University have formed until recently one of the most important intellectual groups of the Hungarians from Transylvania. Several university professors—including two outstanding professors of the Faculty of Law at the University of Bucharest, like civil law professor Ferenc (Francisc) Deák (1927–2001), judges, including judges of the Supreme Court, prosecutors, attorneys, administrative professionals graduated from the Bolyai University. A Hungarian judge of the Romanian Constitutional Court created after the collapse of the soviet type dictatorship was a former student of the Bolyai University (Gábor Kozsokár). Alumni from the Bolyai University were appointed as members of the Government or became deputies and senators in the Parliament of Romania.
Between 1945 and 1959, legal education at the Bolyai University was carried out exclusively in Hungarian; however, it trained legal professionals for the Romanian judicial system at an extremely high level. The explanation is simple: the thorough, profound legal knowledge acquired in the mother tongue can constitute a solid base for professional skills also in a bilingual context. However, the professional knowledge acquired in Romanian only superficially and partially is more challenging to be deepened.
Thus, the merger of the Romanian Victor Babeș University and Bolyai University represents a fundamental breaking point in Transylvania’s legal education and a return to the historical rule, because the merger marked the end of Hungarian legal education. Politics disrupted the continuity of Hungarian legal language and legal culture in Transylvania once again as in 1920. The results of this affected the entire Hungarian minority.
Firstly, the merger led directly to the gradual disappearance of the Hungarian legal language in Transylvania. Hungarian legal practitioners studying the law in Romanian started to use a mixed language with each other that includes Romanian legal terms—since the Hungarian legal terminology has withered. The legally recognized rights on the use of mother tongue faded, and even after the collapse of the Soviet-type dictatorship, the newly recognized minority rights to often remained on paper also because the group of legal professionals who could provide content to these rights was missing.
Secondly, the merger of the two universities made it possible to control and minimize the number of Hungarian speaking legal professionals with law degrees and high qualifications who had to learn in Romanian after 1959. These measures resulted in the fact that Hungarian speakers are massively underrepresented among magistrates, way under the Romanian/Hungarian population ratio. In the present, in the whole of Romania, some 1.2% of judges and prosecutors are Hungarians, while 6.5% of the total populations belong to this minority.
After the fall of the Soviet-type dictatorship, the Hungarian minority in one of its political goals, the reestablishing of the Bolyai University, was unsuccessful. As a result for this failure, historical Hungarian churches in Transylvania (the Calvinist Reformed Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Unitarian Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church) founded the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, as a private university, to complement education in the areas where the Romanian state is not offering mother-tongue university education.Footnote 6 Starting with 2010, this university established a bilingual, Romanian–Hungarian law school (Department of Law).
The present is an experimental one: it is possible remodeling the historical rule?
The experience of Hungarian legal education between 1945 and 1959 should be somehow utilized in the bilingual legal education at the Sapientia University. For instance, while teaching the general theory of the civil law in Romanian, it was found that the Hungarian first-year students have difficulties understanding and learning the Romanian curriculum. The “shock effect” caused by the abstract nature of the legal language and reasoning also affects the Romanian students. Therefore this is not surprising. The question is whether this understanding of Romanian legal text by a Hungarian student can be improved by the mother tongue, in conditions where the lectures and exams take place in Romanian. This subject, like all other subjects, was taught in Hungarian at the Bolyai University. It was during the last moment of the Hungarian legal education at the Bolyai University, in 1958, when the last Hungarian textbook on the general theory of the Romanian civil law was published. György Fekete’s book [4]—if we cast aside the mandatory ideological burden of that time—is a thorough and accurate work. However, the archival sources indicate that professor György Fekete was reprimanded because he did not emphasize the ideology enough. He only described civil law, while avoiding presenting the “class aspects” of civil law—which was expected and required by the dictatorship [3: 152–153].
After the abolition of the independent Bolyai University in 1959, no Hungarian language textbooks discussing the general theory of the Romanian civil law were published until 2016. As indicated above, the civil law subjects are taught in Romanian at the Sapientia University, and so is criminal law and procedural laws. However, in addition to a detailed, 400-page Romanian language textbook published in 2012 [6], in 2016, it was drawn up a first schematic Hungarian coursebook [7, the fourth edition 15]. This short textbook does not intend to replace learning the more detailed information discussed in the Romanian volume. However, it is a useful tool for the understanding legal information and the appropriate processing of the Romania-Hungarian legal terminology. A thorough acquisition of the general theory of civil law is essential for understanding future civil law topics, and it is the base and framework of the knowledge of civil law. Legal institutions of great practical importance, such as nullity or prescription, are only discussed in detail in the framework of the general theory of civil law, so this is not just an introductory subject of only theoretical significance. The practice demonstrated that using this additional book, the results at the exams conducted in Romanian became higher than in previous years.Footnote 7
This civil law textbook introduced a new method of teaching Romanian–Hungarian legal terminology, developed within the framework of the bilingual, Romanian–Hungarian legal education at the Sapientia University: the students work with Romanian and Hungarian jurisprudential texts simultaneously so that they can acquire the competences of real Romanian and Hungarian legal bilingualism. The core of this method is not substituting Romanian language legal education required by specialized professional examination systems for access to legal professions, but making use of the benefits of teaching in the mother tongue for a more thorough preparation of the students. Another exciting feature of this 2016 book is that it builds upon György Fekete’s 1958 volume (not in the continuity of teaching methods but in terminology). Since the start of this experiment, the entire private law taught in Romanian is now covered by Hungarian language textbooks as well, the task was completed in 2020 with the publication of the last textbook on the Romanian law of successions in Hungarian. A similar evolution is ongoing regarding criminal law and procedural laws.
Offering legal education at least partially in Hungarian is essential to the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. It is a reasonable goal that the Hungarian language can become at a particular moment of national reconciliation, an official regional language in Transylvania. However, this requires not only political conditions but also a living Hungarian legal language. In Switzerland, for instance, the unitary private law is applied in German, French, and Italian as well. One stimulating experience is that of New Brunswick, Canada. According to Fernand de Varennes: “Education is the foundation stone for the development and the realization of the potential of linguistic minorities… This has been the experience in New Brunswick, Canada, where the first school to teach law in the language of the French minority opened less than 40 years ago at the Université de Moncton. Of course, the situation there is entirely different from Romania and other countries in Europe: French became an official language in New Brunswick some 40 years ago, and it must be used as a language in court by the judiciary equally to English. The lessons and impact of legal education in the minority’s language have been astounding. In addition to an increasing number of lawyers and judges who come from the French-speaking minority in New Brunswick—about 30% of the population, some 250,000 people in the whole province—members of the minority through legal education in their language have come to become members of the political, economic, social and even cultural elite of the province. This has in no small amount permitted the linguistic minority to improve its financial and social standing—dramatically in the last four decades” [8: 41–42].Footnote 8 Also, professor Fernand de Varennes stated: “In the context of an increasingly globalized world, legal education in more than one language is additionally widely practiced in many countries, and can be beneficial to protect the rights of minorities and contribute to their vitality—and their opportunities” [8: 31].
The normality of legal education in Transylvania should mean that Romanian and Hungarian language legal education can coexist, and can even cooperate effectively and closely.
Legal education in Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg in the modern era
Period
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University
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Sovereignty
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Language of education
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---|
1872–1919
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Franz Joseph University
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Austro-Hungarian Empire
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Hungarian
|
1919–1940
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Ferdinand I University
|
Romania
|
Romanian
|
1940–1945
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Franz Joseph University
|
Hungary
|
Hungarian
|
1945–1959
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Victor Babeș University
|
Romania
|
Romanian
|
Bolyai University
|
Romania
|
Hungarian
|
1959–present
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Babeș-Bolyai University
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Romania
|
Romanian
|
2010–present
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Sapientia University
|
Romania
|
Bilingual education (Romanian and Hungarian)
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