Law between Nationalism and Regionalism: The Integration of the Transylvanian Juridical Field in Greater Romania (1918–1927)

Introduction

Vienna, June 1919. A Transylvanian ¹ judge born of a mixed Hungarian–Romanian family, István Láday, arrives at the Romanian embassy seeking a passport that could allow him to return to his native Transylvania. ² He had arrived in the Austrian capital a few weeks earlier, thanks to the help of Count Ludovic Ambrozy, a Transylvanian landowner, who facilitated Láday’s escape from communist Hungary. ³ Under Béla Kun’s regime, Láday had worked as technical advisor for the justice minister. In Vienna, the Romanian embassy registers his name as Ștefan (the Romanianization of the Hungarian “István”), and Láday manages to return to Transylvania, where he had previously worked as a judge before his appointment in Budapest. Shortly after his arrival, he is accused by the Romanian nationalists in Cluj of being not only anti-Romanian, but also a veritable Bolshevik. The regional administration decides to set up an investigation committee to determine the extent of his collaboration with the Hungarian communist regime. The jury was composed of three Romanian lawyers, active in the Romanian nationalist movement before 1918: Emil Hațieganu, Aurel Socol, and Ioan Suciu. While acknowledging Láday’s participation in the Hungarian communist government, the jury ruled out any ideological adherence to Kun’s regime. On the basis of various witness testimonies, Hatieganu, Socol, and Suciu were reassured of Láday’s loyalty to the Romanian state, ⁴ welcoming him within the Romanian judicial system, in spite of his controversial past. Shortly after, Láday was appointed as counsellor of the Cluj Court of Appeal.

His case is just one example of the adaptability of legal professionals during the troubled transition from the Habsburg monarchy to its successor states. The story serves to shed an unexpected light on a phenomenon—the integration of Transylvania within Romania—which has mostly been interpreted as a process of complete nationalization and discrimination against minorities. Through shifting the focus onto legal professionals, however, we can observe the emergence of a much more ambiguous framework. In defiance of Bucharest’s expectations, Transylvania’s legislative and judicial unification became a cause of harsh confrontation between Romanian jurists from the Old Kingdom and Transylvanian legal professionals: imperial legislation as well as interethnic corporatism and solidarity appeared to be harder to eradicate than previously believed. Politicians and jurists in the capital immediately understood that the multi-national empires had left a substantial legacy, composed of judicial cultural, professional networks, and institutional habits, which the “new” Romanians were unwilling to abandon.

This confrontation has often been neglected by historians. In Romania, the new provinces’ legal integration has mostly been examined by legal historians, who have foregrounded legal technicalities and neglected its social and political implications. ⁵ The few studies produced outside of the field of legal history are theoretically weak, limited to either a collection of documents or a summary of the various unification laws promulgated by governments. ⁶ Typically, when scholars—whether Romanian or not—have explored the transition from the multinational empires to Romania, other aspects have been highlighted more extensively, such as public administration, ⁷ education, ⁸ or economy. ⁹ A significative step forward toward studying the role played by law and/in Romanian society can be found in the second (2020) issue of the Journal of Romanian studies. Mihaela Șerban and Monica Ciobanu have correctly stressed the need to analyze law as a social institution, placing it in a larger context of social and cultural interactions, following the so-called “law and society approach.” ¹⁰ In fact, far from being a mere technical issue, the legal and judicial integration of Transylvania within Romania was a process that significantly affected the local society, and its analysis can reveal new insights into how historiography interprets the aftermath of an empire’s collapse. Indeed, what happened in Romania was by no means unique. In Czechoslovakia, despite the nationalist plea to erase the Habsburg legacy, the Austrian Civil Code was used as a model to develop a new national code; Jan Srb, one of the jurists committed to the drafting of the new code, described it as “laudably functional, brief and clear.” ¹¹ In Poland, when deciding on what legislation had to be implemented, contrasts between former Habsburg and former Russian Poles quickly arose, in spite of their common nationality. In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, legal pluralism lasted throughout the interwar period. ¹² Therefore, Transylvania serves as an appropriate case study whose dynamics, with all the due differences, also can be investigated in a variety of contexts.

Theoretically, my analysis builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “juridical field.” According to Bourdieu,

Legal professionals and judicial institutions produce truly specific traditions, categories of perception and judgment which can never be completely translated into those of the nonprofessional. Juridical institutions produce their own problems and their own solutions according to a hermetic logic unavailable to laypeople. ¹³

For Bordieu, despite the differences in their functions and social role, lawyers, judges, and jurists share common mindsets and practices causing them to relate to society in a peculiar way. The nationalizing state, on its side, as Rogers Brubaker highlighted, ¹⁴ is also a producer of truly specific traditions, categories of perception, and judgments. Through nationalist discourse, the state aims to influence its people’s interpretation of reality, in order to strengthen and legitimize its policies. Consequently, the main question is, Can the categories of perception and judgments characterizing legal professionals obscure and marginalize both nationalism and the policies imposed by the nationalizing state?

My answer is affirmative. I argue that, for Transylvanian Romanian judges and lawyers, legal traditions, the pursuit of professional interests, as well as corporate spirit, often outweighed any sense of nationalism. Simply put, I claim that even during the transition—when the nationalization policies of the Romanian state sought to permeate every aspect of society—professional concerns continued to be prioritized, thereby preventing the full compliance of the judicial field with the nationalization policies of the Romanian state. However, this is not to imply that—with reference to a recent and influential category of scholarly analysis—Romanian legal professionals were “nationally indifferent.” ¹⁵ As with other scholars, I believe the use of the term indifferent is problematic, as it erroneously combines extremely heterogeneous phenomena, thereby losing much of its analytical sharpness. ¹⁶ Romanian lawyers and judges from Transylvania were certainly not indifferent: most of them had actively joined nationalist parties in the Habsburg era and, even after 1918, it is possible to find proof of their conscious self-identification as Romanian patriots. Similarly, even defining them as proper regionalists could be misleading. Rather than being stable, the judicial field’s regionalism was first and foremost situational and contingent, and I will substantiate this claim in the last paragraph of this piece. Following the example set by Rogers Brubaker ¹⁷ and later by Gábor Egry, ¹⁸ I have analyzed legal professionals in their everyday interactions, with the ultimate goal of highlighting their peculiarity among social actors.

Furthermore, answering the above-mentioned research questions will further buttress to a new historiographical trend that tends to not interpret 1918 as a sharp rupture, ¹⁹ instead highlighting the several continuities that survived the end of the war. ²⁰ Legal codes and administrative practices were some of the most tangible of these legacies. Nevertheless, historiography has so far paid scant attention to these legislative continuities, failing to analyze why certain legislation survived while others did not; why local actors struggled for the preservation of norms, institutions, and practices of the old regime; or exploring the relationship was between old structures and those gradually imposed by the nation-state. Gábor Egry has convincingly argued that historiography still lacks “comprehensive comparative studies of local level transition,” which analyze important under-researched topics, such as “to what extent the old elite was replaced, . . . the nature and extent of local measures, personnel change in local institutions, the reconfiguration of politics, social role and public practices.” ²¹ Looking at legal professionals lends itself to this kind of approach.

The documentary basis of this article consists of several sources distributed across various Romanian archives and libraries. First, the Romanian Ministry of Justice’s fund—especially the correspondence between Bucharest and regional judicial institutions—allowed me to isolate the main topics related to Transylvania’s legal integration that were debated among jurists and politicians, as well as the most contentious issues between the central government and regional juridical elites. Furthermore, the Ministry of Justice’s fond includes hundreds of law projects, proceedings of judicial commissions, and other gray literature, fundamental to a comprehensive analysis of relevant legal issues. While the technical dimension of the debate goes beyond the scope of this article, it is not possible to study the juridical field and its agency in the socio-political sphere without familiarizing oneself with the concrete object of their discourses. National and regional legal journals served as another important source, offering an opportunity to grasp jurists’ self-perceptions and understanding their ultimate aims. Indeed, jurists used journals not only to discuss legal theories but to express critiques of colleagues and politicians, using messages filled with metaphors and cultured references.

The present piece, while making no claim at being exhaustive, aims at being a first, embryonic step towards understanding the complex relationship between the nationalizing state and the legal world.

Interethnic Solidarity and Personnel Continuity in Transylvania

On December 1, 1918, tens of thousands of Transylvania’s Romanians gathered in Alba Iulia to officially proclaim the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania. The assembly was attended by more than 1,200 representatives, elected by the Romanians inhabiting the historical province of Transylvania, Banat, Crișana, and Maramureș. The event was made possible by the military defeat of Austria-Hungary, which allowed the Transylvanian Romanian nationalists to assume control of local administration and summon the assembly. The meeting would have served as a plebiscite for the union with the Kingdom of Romania, building on the principle of self-determination. Moreover, it sought to influence the Great Powers who had to settle the Transylvanian question at the Paris Peace Conference. ²²

Romanians constituted the majority of the population of these lands, accounting for almost 60% of the total. The Romanian population was mostly rural, while the cities were dominated by Hungarians and by German-speaking communities of Saxons and Swabians. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Hungarians failed to recognize the Alba Iulia resolution. The German-speaking communities, on the contrary, endorsed it after weeks of negotiations with the Romanian nationalist leaders.

The assembly issued an official document, known as Declarația de la Alba Iulia (The Declaration of Alba Iulia), in which the Transylvanians stated their ideas about regional government. National freedom and equal rights for the co-inhabiting groups were promised, as well as a radical agrarian reform. From the very beginning, although celebrating the Union, the resolution stressed the will of Transylvanians to autonomously manage local affairs. ²³ Indeed, according to art. II, Transylvania would be autonomous until the drafting of the new Romanian Constitution. ²⁴ Consequently, the new regional government was established in the following days. The local administration was the prerogative of a Ruling Council (Consiliul Dirigent). This was composed of twelve departments (resorturi) directed by members of the Romanian elite, mostly representatives of the Romanian National Party (Partidul național român [PNR]), the political group that represented Romanian nationalists in dualist Hungary.

Romanian nationalism arose at the end of the eighteenth century, initially due to the efforts of Greek Catholic clergymen. ²⁵ One such was Inocențiu Micu Klein, bishop of Făgăraș, the forefather of the so-called Transylvanian School (Școala Ardeleană)—the first to plead the Romanian cause to the Habsburg authorities. In the first half of the nineteenth century, representatives of a rising lower middle class replaced priests as leaders of the national movement. The so-called pașoptiști ²⁶ were laymen, sons of peasants who specialized in a profession (the majority being lawyers, journalists, or schoolteachers). ²⁷ The harsh Magyarization policies (especially in the field of education) implemented after the 1867 Austro-Hungarian compromise prompted the formation of a Romanian party which could politically strengthen the Romanians’ grievances. The PNR was established in 1881, having in Iuliu Maniu its most prominent representative. After the Alba Iulia assembly, he was appointed as head of the Ruling Council.

The regional government had exclusive governing powers in local matters, but it had to comply with Bucharest’s orders in relation to military and foreign affairs, as well as infrastructure and customs regulations. Aurel Lazăr, a lawyer from Oradea, was appointed as regional minister of justice. Born in 1872, Lazăr had been an active member of PNR since the end of the nineteenth century. ²⁸ One of the first issues he had to face was related to a lack of personnel. When the unification process began in the summer of 1919, the Transylvanian judicial system consisted of twenty-two tribunals, four Courts of Appeal (Curtea de Apel), and more than one hundred twenty district courts (judecătorii de ocol). The vast majority of judicial personnel consisted of Hungarian professionals who were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the King in order to retain their jobs. The same oath was demanded of lawyers, despite their not being public employees. As might be expected, while waiting for the Peace Conference decisions, many of them refused to swear the oath, creating a void that needed to be filled as soon as possible. According to Emil Hațieganu, Lazăr’s right hand-man, the departure of the Hungarian judges left two-hundred positions vacant; as the Transylvanian Romanian judges numbered just eighty-two, the Ruling Council urgently had to find new judges to fill these positions. The first solution was to appoint lawyers as judges. Another solution could have been the import of personnel from the Old Kingdom, but Hațieganu had made it clear that only a small number could have been incorporated because of their ignorance of local laws. Therefore, Hungarians may have continued to be considered for high-profile posts. ²⁹ Indeed, for the Ruling Council, Romanian ethnicity was not a necessary prerequisite. This was demonstrated by Lazăr’s choice of a Hungarian as the first prosecutor of Sibiu in September 1919, a nomination that enormously irritated most nationalists, who accused him of choosing a non-Romanian with “ties with the Bolsheviks,” ³⁰ a clear reference to the Hungarian Soviet Republic that had collapsed just a few weeks earlier when Romanian troops occupied Budapest.

The Ruling Council’s lenient attitude allowed some Hungarian jurists to not only escape expulsion, but even to climb the social and professional ladder, as with the above-mentioned Ștefan Láday who, after returning to Transylvania, was appointed as judge of the Cluj Court of Appeal. This was not the end of his rise. In the mid-1920s, the regional political elite (consisting of the members of the PNR) endorsed his appointment as professor at Cluj University’s faculty of law, irritating the nationalist poet and activist Octavian Goga who despised the idea. According to him, Láday could not even speak proper Romanian. Eventually, for reasons still unclear, Láday did not obtain the chair at the faculty of law, but in 1926 he was appointed as member of the newly founded Legislative Council in Bucharest. ³¹ It is impossible to assess Láday’s actual loyalty to the Romanian state. What is striking here is that a man with an ambiguous political past, who was not ethnically “pure,” managed to rise so high in the judicial hierarchy of the Romanian state. Thanks to a remarkably adaptable nature, Láday was able to negotiate his position and gain prominent social and professional status. He was not the only Hungarian judge able to climb the hierarchical ladder. In 1921, Elemér Balás was appointed counsellor of the Supreme Court (Curte de Casație) in Bucharest. He died in 1923, receiving a laudatory obituary in the legal magazine Ardealul Juridic (Juridical Transylvania). The unknown author praised Balás’s legal culture and his will to quickly learn Romanian, affording him entry into the Romanian legal world. ³² Another remarkable example was represented by Géza Kiss. Born in Sibiu in 1882, after studying law at Cluj, he undertook an academic career and was appointed rector of Debrecen University in 1918. He was dismissed from his post in 1919 after attending a visit of the Romanian King Ferdinand in the border city of Carei. Hungarian authorities suspected him of having advised his Hungarian colleagues to swear the oath of loyalty to Romania. ³³ Once dismissed, Kiss returned to Transylvania, where he became legal advisor to the Ruling Council and editor for legal magazine Ardealul Juridic. While Láday’s, Kiss’s, and Balás’s cases stand out for the prestigious positions they were able to achieve, they were far from unique. In 1924, several Hungarian judges were still active in regional courts. To name but a few, three Hungarians (Gusztáv Haupt, Lajos Kerner and Sandor Balás) were still working in Cluj’s Court of Appeal. ³⁴ In the Szeklerland, many others continued to operate. In the Banat city of Lugoj, in the mid-1920s sections of the local tribunal were chaired by Hungarians (Bernát Bock and Gyula Szeles). In the same court, Imre Hajós kept his position until 1935, when he retired after thirty-two years of service. ³⁵

The abrupt end of the government led by the Transylvanian Alexandru Vaida-Voievod in March 1920 and the appointment of General Alexandru Averescu, leader of the People’s Party (Partidul Poporului), as the new prime minister sealed the fate of the Ruling Council. In April 1920, it was dissolved and its prerogatives transferred to local departments working closely with the appropriate branches of the central government. The former resort de justiție of the Ruling Council was replaced by a justice department (secretariat de justiție) guided by a jurist who, in the government’s projects, had to assume a more technical, rather than political, role. Alexandru Marta was appointed as Chief of the Justice Department. Marta was born in Caraș Severin county in the historical region of Banat in 1869 and graduated from the University of Budapest. He joined the PNR at a young age, forging ties with the nationalist leaders Alexandru Vaida-Voevod, Aurel Cosma, and George Adam. His brother Gherasim attended the assembly of Romanian delegates held in Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918. His devotion to the Romanian cause was not hindrance to the pursuit of his professional goals. In fact, despite his political activism, he was appointed as counsellor at the Szeged Court of Appeal in 1915. As Chief of the Justice Department, Marta opposed the acceptance of the Old Kingdom’s lawyers at the Transylvanian bar, causing acute dismay in Bucharest (discussed in greater detail below). After a few months, he was transferred to Oradea, where he was appointed president of the local Court of Appeal. Once there, he harshly protested against the personnel transfers ordered by the government, standing up for Magyar colleagues. In March 1921, the minister had transferred two Hungarians, Mihail Vàmossy and Ludovic Korn, and replaced them with two judges from the Old Kingdom. Marta argued that the newcomers were not only unfamiliar with the local legislation but also spoke no Hungarian, and consequently could not contribute to the functioning of the Court in any meaningful way. ³⁶ Was Marta “indifferent” to the nation? His life outside the court suggests otherwise. In September 1920, he joined Astra (Asociația Transilvană pentru Literatura și Cultura Poporului Român), the most important cultural association of Transylvanian Romanians, ³⁷ which had as its ultimate goal both preserving and developing the Romanian culture in Transylvania. In 1927 he was among the donors to the Andrei Șaguna college in Brașov, an eminently Romanian school, founded in 1851 as a stronghold of Romanian language education within Habsburg Hungary. ³⁸ His example suggests that interethnic solidarity in courts did not exclude a conscious identification with the Romanian nation.

Shortly after Marta’s transfer to Oradea, the government appointed Victor Papp as the new Chief of the Justice Department. Like Marta, Papp had made a career in the Hungarian judicial system. In 1912 he featured in Hungarian newspapers as the judge of Cluj’s Court of Appeal, ³⁹ but only two years later he moved to Budapest to work in the local tribunal. ⁴⁰ In 1918, we can find his name among the judges of the Curia, the Budapest Supreme Court. ⁴¹ What is most striking here is that Papp was not the only Romanian active in the Curia: since 1898, Alexandru Onaciu had been a member of the Court as well. ⁴² After his appointment, Papp explicitly stressed the need for bilingual judges, at least in the Courts of Appeal; therefore, he wrote to the minister in Bucharest highlighting the necessity to hire Hungarians who spoke Romanian and Romanians who spoke Hungarian. ⁴³

What were the reasons behind the lenient attitude of Romanian legal professionals towards Hungarian colleagues? First and foremost, Hungarians were essential for the proper functioning of the courts. After the union, imperial legislation had been “temporarily” upheld: Hungarians were highly familiar with it, and it would have been remarkably difficult to replace them suitably. This can be exemplified by the first president of Cluj’s Court of Appeal, Pompeiu Micșa, who in a 1921 article appeared in Ardealul Juridic, where he responded to the accusations of regionalism (coming from the Old Kingdom), arguing that no European country could afford “to marginalize its intellectual workers,” since the consolidation of Romania required “everyone’s contribution.” ⁴⁴ Second, full nationalization was hindered by a strong esprit de corps. Figures like Marta, Papp, Láday, and Kiss shared the same educational background and worked in the same environment. The importance of a common education should not be underestimated. According to Liviu Maior, between 1867 and 1918, a total of 2,499 Romanians had opted for legal studies; as we have seen, some of them made their way into the Hungarian judicial system. ⁴⁵ This firm rootedness entailed a full internalization of Hungarian judicial culture and practices. Indeed, for Transylvanian Romanian legal professionals, it was far easier to work alongside a Hungarian than with Romanians from the Old Kingodm. In this regard, the dispute over working hours was emblematic. In the Old Kingdom, trials were usually held in the afternoon, until 8:00 p.m. In 1925, the minster of Justice proposed that afternoon working hours throughout the country should be standardized, but the proposal stirred harsh protests from Transylvanians judges. It was inconceivable for them “to lose” the entire morning, to be forced to have lunch and dinner in restaurants, and chair a trial late in the day. Wladimir Modrovineanu, counsellor of Târgu Mureș Court of Appeal, defined as “nightwalkers” the Old Kingdom lawyers and judges who appreciated this schedule. ⁴⁶ This commonality of culture and practices cemented an interethnic professional network. Suffice it to say that Láday and Kiss even joined the editorial board of Ardealul Juridic, the legal magazine founded in 1921 in order to provide the Transylvanian juridical field with an “echo chamber” for its own grievances. For many Hungarian legal professionals, therefore, transition from the Austro-Hungarian empire to Romania was much less traumatic than is typically believed. Other intellectuals and state officials had to flee Transylvania after Trianon, ⁴⁷ but jurists—due in large part to the above-stated reasons—managed to work and thrive in Greater Romania.

The opposition between the Transylvanian judicial field and Bucharest grew stronger not only because of the solidarity shown to Hungarian colleagues but primarily due to the failures of legislative unification, which reinforced discourses centered on essential cultural diversity and increased mutual hostility.

Legal Chaos

As mentioned previously, after the union the Romanian government decided to retain imperial legislation in Transylvania as it would have been impractical to abruptly overturn laws that had regulated everyday life for decades. Consequently, the Austrian Civil Code of 1811, the Hungarian Criminal Code of 1878, and the Hungarian Commercial Code of 1875 all remained in force. Nevertheless, the hope of the Romanian government was to extend, as quickly as possible, the Old Kingdom legislation, in order to legally unify the country—a task that was far harder to implement than anticipated. For Transylvanians, legal professionals, accustomed to life in a multi-national and multicultural empire and longing for autonomy and self-rule, legal pluralism did not contradict or contravene political adherence to the nation-state. Indeed, their ultimate goal was the promulgation of new codes, which would have included the best elements of imperial legislation. Many of them were strongly convinced of its superiority and hoped to introduce at least part of it to the whole country. The Austrian Civil Code, which had been extended to Transylvania in 1853, was much appreciated—often the object of praise and admiration in Ardealul Juridic. Géza Kiss argued that the Austrian code “had conquered the hearts and minds of Transylvanian people,” who considered it “a true masterpiece.” ⁴⁸ Equally appreciated was the cadastral system that many Transylvanian jurists hoped to introduce throughout the entire country. This appreciation went far beyond legal circles. Peasants had also internalized the cadastral system, and they seemed unwilling to relinquish it. According to Láday, for the Transylvanian peasant “the land register means order, legal certainty, individual property . . . and its replacement would provoke a turmoil equal to the imposition of a new religion.” ⁴⁹ In the Old Kingdom, such statements were mostly interpreted as signs of regionalism; nevertheless, the imperial legislation’s importance for the development of Romanian nationalism in Transylvania has to be stressed. The introduction of the Austrian Civil Code and the cadastral system in Transylvania had been warmly welcomed by Romanians, who saw in them a protection against the abuses of the Hungarians. ⁵⁰ The cadastral system, in particular, systematized property, eased the access to credit for Romanian peasants, and thus improved their living and working conditions. ⁵¹ The appreciation of imperial laws, consequently, was not always in mutual contradiction with nationalism, nor was it symbolic of an oppositional regional identity. A further aspect should be considered: retaining the old norms for as long as possible would have made the expertise of Transylvanian jurists absolutely essential in handling the transition. Unsurprisingly, when the government decided to set a Legislative Council to draft new unification laws in 1926, Ștefan Láday obtained a seat in it, by virtue of his knowledge of the imperial legislation. Sincere appreciation and personal interests were strongly intertwined, making it hard to assess which was the primary motivation behind the stand of the Transylvanian judicial field.

These notwithstanding, other obstacles hindered the unification process. First of all, imperial laws were instrumental in securing the Transylvanians’ control of local affairs, excluding the government. Directly after unification, the military officials of the Romanian army displaced in Transylvania pushed for the immediate Romanianization of the justice system. Their aim was to bring Transylvanian public prosecutors under their control, by demanding an account of their activities, giving them orders, and appointing new prosecutors. This attitude sparked Aurel Lazăr’s dismay. According to the autonomy granted by the Alba Iulia declaration, the Ruling Council had the right to appoint judges and prosecutors. In confidential correspondence, Lazăr often made clear his will to politically control the prosecutors’ activity. In 1919, he ordered all regional prosecutors to inform him beforehand of any inquiry into political figures and, crucially, not to communicate with any authority other than himself, forbidding them to speak with representatives of the army or of the central government. ⁵² In order to strengthen his claim, Lazăr (perhaps surprisingly) justified his actions by citing the Hungarian judicial system, according to which public prosecutors were placed under the control of the minister of justice. As the Hungarian legislation was still in force in Transylvania, the legitimate minister of justice was Lazăr himself, and not his national counterpart in Bucharest. ⁵³ In a letter addressed to prosecutor Liviu Ghilezan, Lazăr reiterated his point:

You accept the idea that public prosecutors are a political organ, and therefore they cannot have any political agenda but the one of the Ruling Council. They have to defend at every moment the policies and the prestige of the Ruling Council. . . . The duty of leading public life is [the] exclusive prerogative of the Ruling Council, not of the government in Bucharest, not of military authority. They don’t have any right to meddle in our affairs. ⁵⁴

Reminiscent of the strict control exercised by the Hungarian minister of justice in the Habsburg era, Lazăr replicated the system after the union, thus enshrining the Ruling Council as an important instrument for societal control.

On its side, the central government, though conscious of the impossibility of a sudden unification, decided to extend to Transylvania the new laws promulgated by the Bucharest Parliament, or by way of decree-law by the government itself, thereby creating a kaleidoscope of norms and regulations often in mutual contradiction, which increased jurisdictional disputes. Examining the case of speculation law showcases the difficulty of legally standardizing the country. Through Decree-law 1969/1919, the Romanian government introduced new regulations with which to counter speculation: merchants and tradesmen accused of speculation would be judged by local commissions formed by the President of the Chamber of Commerce, a delegate of the Interior Ministry, and a judge of the local court. If convicted, the defendants could appeal to the tribunal. The new system would replace the Hungarian one, according to which speculation cases were the prerogative of the county administration. The Ruling Council, however, considered that the fight against speculation went beyond the scope of the central government; it never established these new commissions in Transylvania but instead kept the former legislation in force. ⁵⁵ Contrary to Bucharest’s expectations, the dismissal of the Ruling Council in April 1920 did not speed up the unification process. The national department in charge of the control of administrative activity reported that, in April 1921, one year after the dissolution of the Ruling Council, the local commission against speculation in Oradea had still not been created; cases of speculation were still judged by the police departments, in accordance with Hungarian law. ⁵⁶ Accordingly, the central government accused the Transylvanian judges—having been tasked with the formation of the commissions—of separatism. Victor Papp responded to these accusations, highlighting the appreciation of Transylvanian jurists of the new law and repudiating the decision of the Ruling Council not to apply it. However, he noted that the Justice Department could not proceed to its application, as there was no ordinance that would have ensured its compatibility with the rest of the Hungarian Criminal Code already in force in Transylvania. ⁵⁷ In a situation characterized by legal pluralism, all new laws had to be rendered compatible with different legislative codes and structures—by no means a small undertaking. Another aspect is worth our consideration. In Transylvania, in the early 1920s, the Chambers of Commerce were still dominated by Hungarian entrepreneurs. It is not unlikely that for many Transylvanian Romanians it would have been much more convenient to keep speculation cases within the county administration, thereby excluding simultaneously both the Hungarians and the supervisory central government.

To make matters worse, trials and proceeding started in Transylvania were hardly able to conclude satisfactorily. When a case reached the Supreme Court in Bucharest, judges from the Old Kingdom had to rule according to laws they were ignorant of. Moreover, evidentiary materials were often written in Hungarian, thus requiring translation. For this reason, the Ruling Council asked for the foundation of three Transylvanian sections (civil, criminal, and commercial) within the Supreme Court, formed exclusively by Transylvanian judges. In this way, Transylvanian jurists could thus open a safe path to the Supreme Court, with consequential career promotion and salary increases. In fact, judicial appointments in the Old Kingdom were heavily influenced by political allegiance, and professional and social networks, virtually excluding newcomers from promotion. Nevertheless, the proposal was refused by the government. The first president of the Supreme Court, Victor Romniceanu, defined it as “an incitement to separatism.” ⁵⁸ In 1920 a group of Transylvanian jurists attempted another such move by proposing the creation of a single section dedicated to Transylvania and formed by local professionals. In the report presented to Parliament, they defined the Old Kingdom’s laws as “inefficient and badly translated from French,” claiming to be driven by an “affirmative separatism” which aimed at consolidating the union. ⁵⁹ In conclusion, they suggested the appointment of George Plopu, a Transylvanian former member of the Hungarian Curia, as president of the new section. ⁶⁰ This proposal was also rejected. Once again Romniceanu expressed his opposition, arguing that the existence of a Transylvanian section would severely threaten the country’s unity. ⁶¹

In order to break the deadlock caused by legal pluralism, in the fall of 1920 Minister of Justice Dimitrie Grecianu set up a commission formed by prominent jurists and assigned it the task of legally standardizing the country. However, Transylvanians were clearly outnumbered within the commission, stirring the irritation of Victor Papp, who often requested fair representation for provincial jurists. ⁶² The commission was ultimately unable to produce any significant outcome and consequently disbanded.

Disagreements over legislative unification exacerbated hostilities between Transylvanian jurists and Bucharest’s legal–political elite. With increasing frequency, this hostility was accompanied by a set of discursive tropes about the essential cultural differences between Transylvanians and regațenii (literally the inhabitants of the Regat, the Old Kingdom). The Kingdom of Romania had used the French legal system as its basis from the second half of the nineteenth century. Transylvanian lawyer Valeriu Roman described the differences between the French and the Transylvanian tradition thus:

Transylvania represents the German judicial spirit, which is antithetical to the French one. The German spirit looks for the details and grasps the nuances; it is not led by emotionality and follows only objective criteria. . . . The French spirit, which characterizes Romanians from the Old Kingdom, tends to superficiality, is led by emotionality, and has a dubious depth of thought. ⁶³

On their side, judges and lawyers from the Old Kingdom who moved to Transylvania complained about the fact that their local colleagues defined them as “oriental” and “Balkan” in a clearly pejorative manner. ⁶⁴ In a polemic pamphlet published by the Cluj Bar in 1930, Cluj’s lawyers harshly stigmatized the massive influx of lawyers and judges from the Old Kingdom in Transylvania:

No one listened to our grievances and the promised improvements never happened; . . . on the contrary, we imported the oriental practice of bacșiș and harassment. . . . New ill-prepared judges who had just left university came in. Politicians meddled in criminal affairs. All the procedures slowed down. ⁶⁵

The above quotation demonstrates the typical arguments used by Transylvanians to disparage Romanians from the Old Kingdom to the present day. They were characterized as carriers of oriental practices, such as bacșiș (a Turkish word meaning bribe), which immediately highlighted their past as subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Judges from the Old Kingdom were “ill-prepared” and defenseless in the face of political meddling, a practice that was termed politicianism, that is, the ubiquity of politics and corruption in all domains of social life.

Tension reached its peak in the debate regarding access to the bar. Given the political dimension this issue assumed in the early 1920s, it deserves a stand-alone analysis.

Romanianizing the Bar

When the war ended, many lawyers born and educated in the Old Kingdom hoped to move to Transylvania, to search for better job prospects. The government endorsed the project; indeed, lawyers could have strongly triggered the unification—and Romanianizing—of Transylvania. Sending dozens of law school graduates to Transylvania also served to unburden the Old Kingdom’s extremely saturated legal market; in 1916, more than 1,500 lawyers were regularly registered with the local bar in Bucharest (which had 300,000 inhabitants at the time), but only 300 of these could earn a satisfactory income. ⁶⁶ Nevertheless, the union provided Transylvanian Romanian lawyers with a credible chance at finally climbing the economic and social ladder. Transylvanian cities were rapidly expanding, and consequently even the bars’ activity was enlarging. In Cluj in 1906, as few as seventy-one lawyers were registered with the local bar, the vast majority of whom were Hungarians. According to Mirel Ionescu, who has closely studied the history of Cluj’s bar, only nine were Romanians. ⁶⁷ After 1918, in “their” nation-state, Romanians could have been able to gain/acquire clients, social status and incomes precluded before 1918. Consequently, when the first lawyers from the Old Kingdom applied for registration in Transylvanian bars in 1920, local lawyers took advantage of the extant Hungarian law (no. 34/1874) to prevent them from registering. This had required a PhD, three years of practice, and the successful completion of an examination as the eligibility criteria for accessing the bar. In contrast, the Romanian law of 1907 required only three years of practice. As a result, the Old Kingdom lawyers were deemed ineligible and hence rejected.

What had begun as a legal controversy soon became a political scandal. During a parliamentary debate on 17 July 1920, the liberal deputy Vasile Haneș defined the Romanianization of the bar “a matter of national interest” that required immediate rectification to protect “national security.” ⁶⁸ In the same week, Amos Frâncu (a Transylvanian lawyer and former member of the PNR) harshly criticized his fellow Transylvanians who, “supported by the Hungarian laws, look at their colleagues from the Old Kingdom as foreigners.” ⁶⁹ The official Transylvanian response came from the chief of the Cluj Justice Department, Alexandru Marta, who in a letter sent to the minister of justice in June 1920 justified the rejection of Old Kingdom colleagues, invoking the preservation of legal culture:

Far be it from me to hinder the legislative unification, I just hope we don’t carry it out at the expense of legal culture. Theoretically, legislative unification should bring us a general improvement, and not worsen the current situation. We should not sacrifice the quality of juridical culture just for the personal profit of some lawyers who have recently arrived in Transylvania. ⁷⁰

Marta’s words betray the sense of superiority that many Transylvanian lawyers felt toward their Old Kingdom colleagues. Transylvanian jurists felt that they belonged to the thriving cultural and juridical world of Central Europe. Nevertheless, Marta’s reference to the newcomers’ “personal profit” is indicative of another issue at stake: the fight for control of the regional legal market. It would now be impossible to fully determine whether the preservation of legal culture was more important than the avoidance of competition. A sense of cultural belonging and socioeconomic interests were closely intertwined, and the former was often used to legitimize and give symbolic strength to the latter.

In an attempt to solve this dispute, a law passed in July 1921 granted Romanian lawyers the right to exercise their profession throughout the national territory, regardless of legislative diversity. The new order notwithstanding, Transylvanian bars continued to reject Old Kingdom lawyers, provoking growing irritation. On June 25, 1922, A. Safirescu, president of the tribunal of Brașov (a city in southern Transylvania) wrote a letter to the Transylvanian Justice Department lamenting the attitude of local lawyers—considered as a sign of regionalism and separatism—and asked to dissolve the bar. The Dean of the Brașov bar at that time was a Romanian, Eugen Mețianu, whose family background should have granted him the label of a proper Romanian. He was the son of the Orthodox Archbishop Ion Mețianu, who in the Habsurg era had been a fierce opponent of Magyarization. It was probably because of his father’s history that Mețianu obtained his post as Dean of the Bar in Brașov, a city where the percentage of Romanian lawyers was extremely low. In 1924, the local newspaper Gazeta Transilvaniei counted only twenty-five Romanian lawyers active in the city: the vast majority being either Hungarians and Saxons. ⁷¹ Despite the need to Romanianize the bar, according to Safirescu Brașov’s lawyers opposed not only the arrival of lawyers from the Old Kingdom but even of judges. They manifested their opposition in Patria, the official newspaper of the PNR, which Safirescu openly called “regionalist.” ⁷² The government followed Safirescu’s advice and dissolved the bar, placing it under external administration. After a couple of months, Mețianu regained his post as Dean, which he kept until his death in 1931. According to the newspapers’ praise-filled obituaries, he was highly regarded by all the citizens, irrespective of their nationality. ⁷³

This opposition continued until 1923, when the representatives of all the bars eventually reached an agreement on a new all-encompassing law on the legal profession, which established uniform criteria of access. By way of compromise, the new law abolished the PhD as a requirement, but accommodated Transylvanian requests by establishing an entrance examination for registration in the bar. ⁷⁴ On the local level, however, tensions remained. In spring 1923, the election for the new Dean of the Cluj bar turned into an enormous scandal that occupied the first pages of local newspapers. The nationalist wing of the bar refused to recognize the election of Dionisie Pop, claiming that he had been endorsed by the Hungarians and that a stronger Romanianization was needed. Indeed, of the bar’s 325 members, the vast majority were Hungarians. ⁷⁵ Many had, at first, refused to swear the oath of loyalty to the King, but were progressively reintegrated into the bar after Trianon, thanks to a decree promulgated by Averescu’s government. Dionisie Pop was a reliable Romanian, the most important judicial advisor of the city council, with years of experience, but he was considered too lenient towards Magyar colleagues. Nationalists, led by Ioan Suciu and Amos Frâncu, resigned from the disciplinary committee as a sign of protest, declaring a fierce opposition to the new Dean. Two factions emerged and clashed: the moderates, who supported interethnic collaboration, and the nationalists, eager to pursue a complete nationalization. In an article that appeared in the newspaper Clujul in May 1923, the local lawyer Ion Giurgiu harshly criticized the nationalists and their leaders, including Ioan Suciu and Aurel Socol (two of the lawyers who acquitted Láday) accusing them of undermining the harmony of the Bar. For Giurgiu, the alliance between Romanians and Hungarians to elect Pop was legitimate and fair. Indeed, all the more so, as it avoided the election of Valeriu Roman, who was deemed completely unreliable because of his suspected socialist leanings. ⁷⁶ Roman represents the ambiguity of the juridical field. As you may recall, he advocated the superiority of the German judicial spirit. Giurgiu suspected him of being a socialist, but in the following years he joined the far-right group instead, before entering the national-liberal party in the late 1920s. In 1923, together with Ioan Suciu and Amos Frâncu, Roman was to be found at the top of a new professional association named the “Alliance of Romanian Lawyers” which had set as its ultimate goal the complete legal Romanianization of the new regions. The association declared a symbolic war even on Romanians who, “consciously or not, endorse[d] the dangerous claims of the enemy.” ⁷⁷ It was the beginning of a constant radicalization of the legal profession, which reached its peak in the 1930s.

The Legal Professionals as an Expression of Transylvanian Regionalism?

At this point, it might seem reasonable to include many Transylvanian legal professionals within the scope of a larger Transylvanian regionalism—that is to say, the conviction of a substantial difference between Transylvania and the Old Kingdom arising from distinct historical and cultural developments. In other words, the idea “that a particular local experience differed substantially from the general Romanian or Bucharest variety, and the incorporation of regional traditions into a general unification plan was absolutely essential.” ⁷⁸ Politically, this conviction led to demands for de-centralization, promoted mostly by the PNR. Discursive tropes stressing the essential difference between Transylvania and the Old Kingdom served to legitimize and give symbolic strength to this political project. As Gábor Egry has argued, the regionalist political discourse “had to offer the vision of a stable regional group, which was simultaneously part of and different from the Romanian nation, as it had to situate Transylvanian Romanians vis-á-vis Hungarians and Germans too, and this required preservation of national boundaries.” ⁷⁹

The judicial field’s position, however, seems much more ambiguous. This ambiguity clearly emerged in 1923-1924, when the new liberal minister of justice, Gheorghe Mârzescu, began drafting new unification laws for the judicial system. Shortly after his appointment, Mârzescu established a commission to draft a new, unitary, judicial system, standardizing appointment and promotion criteria throughout the country. The commission was formed by the first president of the Supreme Court Romniceanu, by the Chișinău judge Pavel Crăciunescu on behalf of Bessarabia, and Alexandru Marta representing Transylvania. In February 1924, in an interview with the national newspaper Presa, Ștefan Láday admitted being aware of the main points of the reform under the commission’s examination, and praised its first draft as “correctly written and well organized.” ⁸⁰ In addition, he agreed with Mârzescu’s intention to not abolish the control of the minister of justice over public prosecutors, arguing that “the minister should be free to relocate or retire them at his will.” ⁸¹ For the Romanian public, the political control of public prosecutors was one of the trouble spots that characterized the debate on the new reform. A growing body of opinion had formed against political meddling in judicial affairs, and the role played by public prosecutors was one of the most controversial issues. A group of lawyers and judges, led by lawyer Dem. I Dobrescu, ⁸² politically close to the Peasant Party (Partidul Țăranesc [PȚ]), campaigned for an all-encompassing reform seeking to eradicate political control of prosecutors. However, Láday aligned himself with the National Liberal Party (Partidul Național Liberal [PNL]), which had promoted strict centralization policies, much to the displeasure of the Romanian political elite of Transylvania, which usually sided with the Old Kingdom–based PȚ to fight the liberals. His position expresses a commonality of viewpoints about this feature of the judicial system which cut across regional boundaries and overshadowed political tensions.

The Transylvanian juridical field abandoned every regionalist issue in order to gain as much professional benefit as possible from the new reform and, simultaneously, to protect their interests against any possible normative change. In this regard, lawyers were extremely active. Certain Transylvanian lawyers sided with their Old Kingdom counterparts in their fight over the introduction of public notaries (a Transylvanian institution) across the whole country. Mârzescu wanted to import the institution of notary—as organized in Transylvania—depriving lawyers of one of their most remunerative sources of profit, the authentication of official acts. In May 1924 the Romanian Bar’s national Congress was held in Chișinău, where the lawyer from Cluj Ion Giurgiu called the notary “a useless institution, which did not bring any benefit to the Transylvanian population.” ⁸³

Moreover, lawyers from across the country joined forces to prevent any changes to the 1923 bar law, which made a lawyer’s signature obligatory for every act that citizens presented in court (official complaints, contestations, self-declarations etc.). Owing to this law, ordinary people had to pay considerable amounts of money to lawyers, who were free to establish the price for their signature arbitrarily. Naturally, this enabled abuses of all kinds, even in Transylvania. In Brașov, a lawyer demanded more than 1,000 lei for his signature in a self-declaration for a citizen seeking to settle a trivial dispute with his landlord. ⁸⁴ Unsurprisingly, in 1924, Mârzescu received a worried letter from Cluj’s Justice Department, in which Transylvanian lawyers were defined as a “state within the state.” ⁸⁵ The minister of justice wanted to eliminate this regulation, but his plans were met with harsh opposition by the country’s lawyers: Mârzescu’s personal fond in the Bucharest archives includes many letters from lawyers (both from Transylvania and the Old Kingdom) complaining about the eventual change of the 1923 law. When it came to defending interests, Transylvanian and Old Kingdom lawyers ironed out every difference and stood united in the defense of their privileges.

Another proof of the juridical field’s ambiguity is set by Victor Papp. We have mentioned his past within the Hungarian judicial system. As Chief of the Transylvanian justice department, he had asked the government to hire as many bilingual personnel as possible. However, he never questioned the ineluctability of justice nationalization. In 1923, when the government proposed to eliminate the mandatory use of the robe for lawyers during trials, he wrote a letter to the minister, emphasizing the symbolic role played by the robe, and its “national” importance. Firstly, lawyers and judges wearing it would impress minorities, providing Romanian justice with a prestigious image. Second, the robe would distinguish Romanian justice from Hungary’s, where at that moment its use was not compulsory. ⁸⁶

Conclusion

In light of the above, the assumption stated in the introduction finds confirmation. The legal integration of Transylvania within Romania is a story of nuances, complexities, and a plurality of motivations, and no single theory could ever hope to include them all. In this scenario, nationalist and regionalist tropes intermittently emerge, according to the different issues at stake. In the immediate aftermath of the Union, pragmatism prevailed over nationalism. Lawyers and judges tried to secure their professional situation, seeking to exploit the possibilities opened by legal pluralism to pursue individual and group interests. In this sense, even the solidarity shown toward Hungarians becomes much more understandable. Indeed, Magyars were fundamental for preserving the proper functioning of courts. Moreover, they spoke the same professional jargon and shared the same practices meaning that it was much easier to collaborate with them than with Romanians from the Old Kingdom. Additionally, the common past within Habsburg universities and courts should not be underestimated: it created the commonality of mentality theorized by Bourdieu, who unsurprisingly emphasized the importance of education in defining juridical field self-consciousness. The fight for the preservation of a legal culture they deemed prestigious was another feature of the juridical field’s action during transition. For Transylvanian jurists, legislative unification was an occasion to modernize the country with a set of laws they highly regarded. At the same time, imperial legislation could represent a path to career advancement, as we have seen in Ștefan Láday’s case: through their expertise, Transylvanian legal professionals secured their position within the new nation-state.

In Bucharest, the attachment to old laws and the solidarity shown to Hungarian colleagues was mostly interpreted as regionalism and separatism; nevertheless, framing the judicial field as a stable category could be misleading. For Valeriu Roman, it was possible to celebrate the superiority of the German legal spirit—and discredit the French alternative upon which the Romanian judicial system was based—and simultaneously lead a nationalist organization directed first and foremost against Transylvanians who continued to hinder the Bar’s nationalization. Alexandru Marta and Victor Papp’s will to retain some of the old norms, and their solidarity towards Hungarian colleagues, can hardly be interpreted as separatism. Undoubtedly, regionalist tropes and discourses became more and more frequent as the process of legislation failed to achieve results. Transylvanian lawyers and judges had no hesitation in using elements associated with the former empire (in this case legislation) to differentiate themselves from the Old Kingdom. Nevertheless, regionalism disappeared once the interests of the Transylvanian judicial field coincided with those of Old Kingdom colleagues, creating a professional solidarity which transcended the Carpathians. Consequently, the judicial field’s regionalism differs substantially from the regionalist political discourse of the Transylvanian political elite. ⁸⁷ The latter, aiming at a concrete political goal (de-centralization), created discursively a stable regional group distinct from both Hungarians and Romanians from the Old Kingdom. The juridical field’s regionalism, on the contrary, presents itself as situational and contingent. The juridical field did not pursue any long-term political project, and therefore it could, depending on circumstances, invoke the preservation of a “foreign” legal culture, but shortly after endorse policies promoted by the central government. Several factors influenced its agency, and only by approaching them simultaneously will it be possible to restore the complexity of transition.

The research opens up not only to comparisons with other Central and Eastern European countries, but even with Western countries which experienced drastic border and regime changes. My analysis has emphasized the peculiarity of the judicial field among social actors and, in view of this, the need to adopt a European perspective, aiming at showing the transnationalism of the culture of legal professionals, becomes obvious.