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MY HUNGARY: IN HONOR OF KÁROLY BÁRD
declared the death penalty unconstitutional. Why not? It cost them nothing and
it gained Hungary some respectability with the Council of Europe. One thing that
this case should teach us is that the ‘standing’ rule in the U.S. has a sound basis.
Courts should not be engaged in propaganda. Courts make sounder decisions only
if real people, defendants, as well victims, have standing, that is they are affected
by the court’s decisions.
On the way out of the Court, I picked up my coat at the cloak room. I hada claim
tag with the inscription “Supreme Soviet. Hungarian People’s Republic.” Institutions
designed for constitutional scrutiny were now serving new (political) purposes.
What should we infer from these stories about Hungary in its critical time of
transition from communism to some sort of democratic capitalism? Many of these
vignettes (Végvari and capital punishment) have little to do with democracy or
capitalism. Yet they may suggest a mentality of excess that correlates with political
transitions. In the capital punishment decision, in particular, the Court was acting
in a way to impress outsiders.
There is another point about comparative law that can be drawn from these
Hungarian stories. The actual law in Hungary had little to do with any of these
results. If anything, the law of procedure was important in reaching a peaceful
accommodation about the conflicting political interests. This is true in all legal
systems. The rules of the game are more important than judgments by the referee
about whether a strike is a strike, a ball is a ball. In European legal education,
however, procedure has a lower status than the theory-laden fields of substantive
law. No one exports its procedural system but, as we have noted, the German
Dogmatik has had influence around the world.
Now back to the cuisine. My parents told me that for the first five years of
my life living in Budapest I was entranced by the food, mostly because as my
parents told me, I ate nothing but palacsinta. 1 discovered that palacsinta in
Hungary is something like a hot dog in the U.S. The best one are sold on the streets.
A restaurant will make it too fancy and ruin the taste.
But it is hard to forget the pastry at Gerbeaud or the fish soup at the Duna Korz6.
In the 1990’s I organized a conference at Rackeve on the outskirts of Budapest. In
that neighborhood we did in fact find a good palacsinta stand.
In 1996 I visited Hungary again with a friend who prepared a memorial trip,
a calendar with photographs of key spots. On one sign we see: Fleischer, György,
Géplakatos Mester. This is in fact the name under which I was born. Yet I am
relatively sure that this is not me. As Karoly pointed out to me, the sign lists only
6 digits in the phone number. Yet the sign is sufficiently close to remind of my
mystical connection to the Hungary of my parents’ origins.
Now allow me to close this trip down into my past by reflecting on the
Hungarian language. My sister Lillian, born 9 years before me, spoke Hungarian
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