Our objectives
We examine the past but seek answer to the questions of the present and of the future.
Our students can meet with us already in the first year. We study and teach historical foundation subjects: lectures and seminars, mandatory and facultative courses in Hungarian Legal, Constitutional and Administrative History, in Comparative Legal and Constitutional History are offered by our department.
We not only intend to provide general information and to transmit knowledge of legal and constitutional history. We don't want to do archeology, to present ancient law books and institutions only for entertainment having a purpose in itself. Our aim is to prepare specialists of the future and to provide them with a foundation which will be stable even if positive law may change time and again.
We strive to lay the foundation of courses in positive law that follow later in the curriculum and require a historic introduction to their institutions and concepts. Moreover, we try to find and transmit the way of thinking which is characteristic of lawyers and public servants. Therefore, we go back to the ideas, mentality and attitudes of our famous ancestors, ancient, medieval and modern jurisconsults, our masters in legal science.
We would like to explore the moral values which hide behind decisions made by lawyers who lived in past societies. We want to realize the deadlocks of legal and constitutional history and understand how they can be avoided.
We try to find the lesson of history in order to offer something lasting: the knowledge of how we can use the law and what we can't expect from it.
