Legal cultures in modern Eastern Europe: traditions and transfers

On 1 May 2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Hungary joined the European Union. At the same date the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History began a project supported by the Volkswagen Foundation with the title “Legal cultures in modern Eastern Europe: traditions and transfers”. The project addresses the forms of legal transfer which have occurred in all the regions of Eastern Europe since the beginning of the 19th century. It seeks to describe the means whereby western codifications and systems of jurisprudence were transferred to the East, what proportion statutes, academic writings, legal education and case law had in this process, and what effect the integration of western legal models had on each of the individual legal traditions of Eastern Europe.