Uses of civil justice and social policy in the Habsburg Monarchy

Projektleiterin: PD Dr. Borbala Zsuzsanna Möller-Török
Geplanter Projektstart: April 2022

The project, funded by the Austrian research Fund (FWF), analyzes the making and social effect of the Austrian code of civil procedure (ZPO, 1895/98) and its adaptation in Hungary (1911/15), regarded in historical literature as the foundation of social civil proceeding. Yet the empirical evidence of persistently high litigation rates in some crownlands after adopting the ZPO raised the hypothesis of regionally specific legal behavior. The project asks about the ways and the extent to which the Trans- and Cisleithanian legal administrations created a socially protective civil jurisdiction. Did access to civil justice become a social right? How was the new civil procedural law used in various parts of the Monarchy?

This collaborative project is a first-time inquiry into the social and institutional dimensions of the Austrian and Hungarian procedural reforms, in regard to the emerging social citizenship in the Habsburg Monarchy: it casts the procedural reforms as a policy field, where decision-making involved new knowledge resources beyond legal norms, such as legal statistics (Module 1). It also explores the mobilization of civil courts, litigation behavior and societal correlates of civil litigation rates by quantitative research methods, closing historical and socio-legal research gaps (Module 2).

Research Team:

PD Dr. Borbala Zsuzsanna Török (University of Vienna) – Principal Investigator, Module 1

Prof. Dr. Walter Fuchs (Berlin School of Economic and Law) – International Cooperation Partner, Leader Module 2

Dr. Mátyás Erdélyi (University of Vienna) – Postdoctoral Researcher, Module 2