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50 Acta Jur. Hng. 1 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/ajur50 and id is 1 raw text is: 1216-2574 / USD 20.00 ACTA JURIDICA HUNGARICA @ 2009 Akadimiai Kiadd, Budapest 50, No 1, pp. 1-30 (2009) DOI: 10.1556/AJur.50.2009.1.1 CSABA VARGA* The Quest for Formalism in Law Ideals of Systemicity and Axiomatisability between Utopianism and Heuristic Assertion Abstract. After the relationship between form and content in art and law is surveyed and the axiomatic approach to systemicity in both philosophy and law of both the classic and modem ages is scrutinised, the want of axiomatisability-in presence of correlations between axiomatism and law notwithstanding-is established. The very nucleus of any axiomatic system is that in some set of building blocks there are few foundation stones from which one given overall building can be built up in one given form and with the inherent necessity of that the operation, in the security of reaching the same end result, can be repeated by any actor at any future time. However, the relationship amongst the constituents of legal systems is not such as to allow to make up their edifice in exclusively one form, only if the procedure is defined and some constituents as foundation stones are designated. For legal systems are truly dynamic systems thoroughly built on substantive interconnections. Therefore they resist- albeit idealise-axiomatisation. In consequence, exclusively the heuristic value of the axiomatic ideal can be fully implemented and scholarly realised in the domain of law. Keywords: form, content, substance; philosophy, aesthetics; Hegel, Marx, Lukics; mos geometricus; legal concepts, law-codes Formalism is a recurrent topic in debates on law without, however, its components being analysed to the adequate depth. In the English-speaking legal world it takes precedence as the duality or antagonism of form and substance' the fact notwithstanding that its origins in philosophy have once * Scientific Adviser, Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Professor, Director of the Institute for Legal Philosophy of the Catholic University of Hungary. E-mail: varga@jog.mta.hu 1 For some classics, see Kennedy, D.: Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudica- tion. Harvard Law Review, 89 (1976) 8, 1685-1778; Atiyah, P. S.: Form and Substance in Anglo-American Law. Oxford-New York, 1987; Summers, R. S.: The Jurisprudence of Law's Form and Substance. Aldershot-Brookfield, 2000. For some recent papers, cf. also Epstein, E. J.: Codification of Civil Law in the People's Republic of China: Form and Substance in the Reception of Concepts and Elements of Western Private Law. University

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