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PhD Studies in Law in Hungary–Difficulties and Possibilities (Before the 9th Academic Year of Géza Marton Doctoral School of Legal Studies)
38-53Views:115In this study the authors (Gábor Kecskés as the secretary of Doctoral School of Legal Studies at István Széchenyi University and Sándor Szemesi as the secretary of Géza Marton Doctoral School of Legal Studies at Debrecen University) examine the legal framework concerning doctoral schools of legal studies in Hungary as well as the specialties (and realities) of Géza Marton Doctoral School at Debrecen University. One of the main purposes of this article is to salute the beginning of the 100th academic year at Debrecen University, additionally the article tries to introduce how doctoral schools can fulfil the continuously changing (more precisely, tightening) requirements of the Hungarian Accreditation Committee, taking into consideration the unwritten expectations as well as the general interests of the host universities and the doctoral school itself.
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The Criminalisation of Active Bribery of Public Officials: A New KOL Research in Hungary
9-29Views:241The aim of the three-year project “Novelties of Criminal Law in Legal Consciousness” was to measure the knowledge and attitudes of lay people concerning criminal law including regulatory novelties with a questionnaire-based survey. In this paper, the authors analyse the responses to questions related to active bribery of public officials. The research has verified our hypothesis that the average person has a fragmented knowledge even about this sector of criminal law. However, this is partly due to the fact that the respondents – compared to the differentiation of the legal regulation – usually have schematic knowledge on the topic. The answers were strongly influenced by attitudes towards this type of criminality. It was not substantiated, however, that this knowledge is substantially affected by socio-economic factors, by media consumption or by encountering criminality. Our hypothesis regarding the novelty of regulation has been only partially proven: there are more than three times more people whose answers reflect the old regulation than the new one. However, this was not necessarily due to actual knowledge of the older regulation, but rather to the fact that it was more in line with respondents insensitivity to legal distinctions.
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Then and now: laws on first and second generation biometric systems
78-90Views:205Although the security benefits these technologies offer security benefits to our society, their widespread application can involves and clearly leads to serious legal issues and concerns, including technological encounters, disputes and grave concerns for individual citizens’ rights of privacy. Various forms of identification, such as driving licenses, passports, and other identity cards, are progressively being combined with biometric information used by ever-changing and more advanced systems. With no doubts, it can stated as well that the use of them will be spread to other sectors too. Therefore, It safe to assume that this noticeable prosperity of personal information will involve and ache for more advanced data protection measures, encryption technologies, and other safeguarding measures, both to inspire their acceptance and use by the civilian population and to keep this critical information from falling into the wrong hands.
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Knowledge of Law in the Hungarian Population Today and a Half Century Ago – A Comparative Analysis based on Kálmán Kulcsár’s Empirical Survey of 1965
11-28Views:212Knowledge of law is certainly one component of legal culture. Due to the support of the Hungarian Research Funds (OTKA) the authors of this paper carried out a comprehensive empirical analysis of this issue in Hungary. In doing so they strongly relied on Kálmán Kulcsár’s findings and insights stemming from his pathbreaking studies half a century ago.
The empirical study was carried out by the Szonda Ipsos Market and Opinion Research Institute in the framework of an omnibus questionnaire survey with a random sample of 1000 people in 2013. Thirteen questions essentially similar to certain questions used by Kulcsár in 1965 (for instance: Have you ever read a bill or an act? Have you ever participated in a judicial process? Who or which body enacts a bill in Hungary?) were posed in order to provide a possibility for the comparison of the actual results and those of Kulcsár.
We found that the general level of knowledge of law had increased substantially in the past decades. Knowledge related to constitutional law is the prominent example of this growth and it can definitely be coupled with the functioning of the democratic political system in the last 25 years. However, except from constitutional law, the growth of legal knowledge is due almost solely to the increased level of education and not a generally improved legal consciousness of the society.
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Organic laws and the principle of democracy in France and Spain
62-74Views:124During the last decades, several countries have entrenched a special subcategory of law, which is adopted by stricter procedural rules than that of the ordinary legislative process. These laws are enacted by qualified majority, by the consent of the two chambers of the legislature, and they are subject to mandatory constitutional review before their promulgation, or additional safeguards are implemented in the ordinary legislative process. In this study, I compare the experiences of two crucial legal systems, France and Spain, which provide two different frameworks of qualified law. My aim is to identify the most contested issues from the legal nature of qualified laws, and to seek the proper solutions of these issues, as well as an ideal model of qualified law. My contribution focuses on the relationship between qualified laws and the principle of democracy, and aims to open up new perspectives in this regard.
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Towards a European Legal Scholarship. Recommendations of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) on the Development of Education and Research
54-61Views:106The German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) in 2012 published its study „Perspectives of Legal Scholarship in Germany. Current Situation, Analyses, Recommendations”. The recommendations are preceded by empirical and quantitative descriptions that provide information on the current situation of legal study and research in Germany. The document emphasizes the importance of cooperation between theoretical and practical part of the legal education. The report considers that students should acquire the ability of critical approach to legal prac- tice instead of memorising the substantive legal rules.
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Effective and Actual? Analysis of Employment-Related Directives in the Legal Practice of the Curia of Hungary Regarding the Enforcement of Workers’ Rights
193-216Views:209In view of the special nature of the employment relationship, subordination of the parties results in a weaker legal position on the employees’ side. Certain guarantees of protection are absolutely necessary to compensate for this asymmetry, thus, among other things, the effectiveness of employees’ enforcement plays a key role. This is why our research seeks to answer the question whether some crucial employment-related directives of the European Union, as well as the broader European Union legal corpus also including legal practice. Furthermore we try to find the answer to the question that, how do these legal sources appear in the domestic legal practice, primarily in the relevant judgments of the Curia of Hungary, and the extent to which these references facilitate the effective enforcement of the workers’ rights.
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The main factors influencing the level of the knowledge of law
71-95Views:175The paper deals with the level of legal knowledge among the Hungarian population measured with a representative survey asking questions regarding the knowledge of certain constitutional, civil, administrative and procedural legal rules releant in everyday life. Our findings are compared to a research carried out in 1965, using the same questions. Furthermore we analysed the relationship of knowledge level as a dependent variable with (i) socio-demographic (gender, age, education, etc.), (ii) media consumption (some 30 written, electronic and internet-based items), (iii) interaction with the legal system (read a law, consulted with a lawyer, participated in a trial) and (iv) civic activity. We found that the level of education is crucial, and interaction with the legal system has some additional significant impact, too. All other independent variables seem to have less significance or no impact at all. The relative strength of explanatory variables has largely changed in the past decades and in some cases even the direction of impact altered (for example women seem to be more educated about the law nowadays, in a sharp contrast to the 1965 data.)
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The Basic Thesis of the State Theory of Győző Concha: "Theory of Constitiution"
133-160Views:283Győző Concha’s book “Politika”, published in 1895, is still relevant for the understanding of the theoretical problems in constitutional law. Thus, it is important to analyse the peculiar use of constitutional terms in his theory in order to understand his unique interpretation of the concept of the constitution and its relevance for political and legal philosophy. The methodological goal of the research is to present the meaning of the concepts used by Concha, and to highlight their functional role. It is also an important question as to how Concha’s constitutional theory was incorporated into his political philosophy, and how these concepts are interpreted in today’s political and legal terminology. It is also the paper’s aim to “translate” Concha’s vocabulary and constitutional theory into the language used in 21st century constitutional theories, and to present and evaluate the relevance of his constitutional theory in understanding the current constitutional problems of political communities.
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Neighbouring Rights of Press Publishers: Issues Relating to Transposition
Views:214Press publishers spend billions on producing quality journalism each year. While the costs of producing well supported, quality journalism manifest in producing the original content, i.e. the very first copy, further costs – due to digitization – are negligible. Parallel to this, prosperous business models thrive on re-using articles in press publications, as well as optimizing them for search and social media platforms attractive enough to generate huge amounts of advertising revenue. But not for the those who actually make the content. The European Union seeks to persuade large digital companies to take part in the financing of European content, mainly through competition law or by taking steps to improve the competitive position of European companies. The rules relating to press publishers of the EU Copyright Directive of 2019 intend to serve this purpose and will be analysed in this paper.
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Unfair Termination Review During Probationary Period: The Case of Iraq in Light of New Judiciary Trends
75-89Views:252Probation is a trial period to test a new employee for a particular position. It is commonplace for many employers to stipulate that the contract begins with probation based on a mutual agreement with the employee. During the probationary period, more flexible standards are given to review unfair termination. Notwithstanding, a degree of protection insofar as it safeguards employees from the risk of unfair termination shall be granted. Article 37 in the Iraqi Labour Code No. 37 of 2015 permits the employer to test the employee for a maximum of three months if the latter has no professional certificate. The same article empowers the employer to terminate the contract if the employee has failed in the suitability test without setting any standards for such a test. In reviewing cases arising on the basis of unfair termination claims, the judiciary in some developed countries has come up with basic standards of the suitability test. This paper, therefore, attempts to examine Article 37 in the Iraqi Labour Code in light of the new judiciary trends and finally suggests redrafting the mentioned article to be more compatible with the rights of contractual parties.
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The Challenges of Cryptocurrencies in Substantive Criminal Law and Procedure
79-98Views:908The legal status of cryptocurrencies is a gray area in most legal systems, although criminals increasingly abuse cryptocurrencies to fund criminal activities. The study analyses solely the criminal use of cryptocurrencies. For example money launderers have evolved to use cryptocurrencies in their operations, therefore legislative changes at EU level, or the uniform application of existing anti-money laundering regulations have been required. In a trend mirroring attacks on banks and their customers, cryptocurrency users and exchangers have become victims of cybercrimes themselves. Conventional crimes may be committed via cryptocurrencies such as fraud and extortion. Darknet criminal markets use cryptocurrencies as payment instruments since they offer better anonimity and some of them greater privacy. They are less traceable and their decentralised system challenges law enforcement.
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A Case Study on the Interaction Between the General Data Protection Regulation and Artificial Intelligence Technologies
45-57Views:209This paper presents a general overview of the problems regarding the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) raised in the official published works of the European Union (EU) and interprets these problems from the perspective of the Hungarian experts as a case study. Even though a new regulation on AI has already been proposed at the EU level, the paper evaluates specific rules and principles regarding data protection since data is the lifeblood of AI systems and the protection of such data is a fundamental right enshrined in the EU legislation via the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The result of the study shows that the application of the GDPR on AI systems in an efficient and uniform way might be at stake since different outputs were generated by the experts to the same legal questions deriving from a scenario presented.
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Women at the Crossroads of Family and Employment Policies
Views:1234Labour market situation of young mothers highly depends on the convergence of family and employment policies. Since 2010 there have been important changes in the Hungarian policies in order to stimulate fertility and to enhance the female employment rate. In our research we combined legal and sociological methodologies to analyse the effect of these policies. We argue that Hungarian policy has been in a serious uphill struggle to find a balance between two contradicting principles: providing sufficient family allowances and maintaining labour market flexibility by weak protection of employees. This dichotomy of principles has led to an unsustainable employment policy and made women more vulnerable in the labour market. We suggest that the differences would be reconciled through labour reforms, measures concerning working time arrangements, part time work and protection against dismissal have to be revisited along with protection of fathers with young children.
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Cognitive Sciences and Judicial Decision-Making
109-132Views:443Nowadays, judges are expected not just to administer justice, but to have skills and abilities to realize and be aware of standards and laws which can be discovered and analysed by the so- called cognitive sciences. In case we accept that “judges are human beings as well”, we must also assume that their minds and decision-making processes are subject to generally accepted scientific facts. However, cognitive sciences are less known in Hungary, and by using their fruitful results in legal procedures (e. g. in court trials) a greater level of objectivity can be achieved in adjudication which can lead to more accurate judicial decisions.
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Legal Regulation and Practice of the Non-Material Indemnification and Rehabilitation in the United Kingdom
165-183Views:139The article analyzes the specialties of the English legal system with a focus on the legal regulation and court practice of tort law, and especially the non material indemnification and rehabilitation of the bodily injured. The study starts with the description of the main characteristics of the tort law, the definition and jurisprudence of non material damages, like pain and suffering and loss of amenity and psychological damages are also reviewed in detail with respective court cases. The study also gives an analysis of the connection between tort law and insurance law, how one effects the other. Nowadays the indemnification process of the bodily injured cannot be full without rehabilitation. Like in most of the Western European countries, in the United Kingdom the rehabilitation process is a complex and centrally managed procedure with the help of state institutions and programs.
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Ideal image and the reality: the changing of career plan among stu- dents of law faculties in the university studies
81-113Views:172The present study examines how the image of profession changes for law students in the different stages of their connection with the profession. It assumes that at the beginning of their studies, law students have an idealised image of their chosen study program and the profession based on it. This image changes during the years of studying, and especially after graduation, it is shifted by work experience and by the factual state of the profession. Students of the Faculty of Law, especially law students identify themselves based on the internal and external elements of a prestigious profession, which was established hundreds of years ago. Due to their early career choice, their professional socialization during the first years at the university creates the ideal image of the legal profession, which they strongly relate to. The relationship of this ideal image to reality, and how different it is from the real situation of various professional groups of the legal profession is an important question. The present study answers this question based on the results of multiple empirical researches.
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Specialities of Collective Labour Disputes
217-232Views:159We are currently living in a period when technological, economic and other changes fundamentally influence the nature of legal relationships. There is no difference in the labour law palette, as atypical employment is gaining ground in law enforcement circles. In our view, this development cannot be derived solely on substantive law, but should also be presented at the level of litigation and, where appropriate, ADR procedures. Perhaps it is somewhat ironic that it is precisely the collective labour dispute, which is not popular in Hungarian civil society litigation law, in which the emergence of innovative dispute resolution methods can be observed from time to time. Therefore, our work primarily examines the extrajudicial practice of collective dispute resolution, complemented by the solutions used in the legal systems of some countries less researched by the domestic labour law environment. Our aim is to highlight the potential of ADR methods in collective disputes and to explore new, unknown opportunities for domestic law enforcement.
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Human Rights as Fundamental Sources of Patients’ Rights in Light of the Development of Hungarian and German Laws
157-168Views:238Medical practice affects human life and health, which are not just some of the key social values, but actually express the existence of a human being. Therefore, it is a requirement to set the legal standards to guarantee the preservation and respect of human rights during medical treatment. Patients’ rights provide specific types of human rights in the area of patient care. The German legal system grants the preservation of these rights in a contractual framework that cannot be breached. In Hungary, patients’ rights are listed in the Public Health Act. Despite the diverse methods in regulating patients’ rights, the underlying public policy considerations are the same in both systems. The goal of this study is to provide a comparative analysis on the development of the German and the Hungarian regulation of patients’ rights focusing on the consideration of human rights.
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Some Labour Law Aspects of Psychological Contract Theory
50-69Views:204The aim of this paper is to present the central-topics of psychological contract theory, focusing on the relevant labour law contexts. The main research method used is an examination of relevant studies, articles and monographs on the topic, a secondary analysis of empirical research data systematically compiled by the authors, and an exploration of the main labour law aspects and contexts. The difference between an employment contract and a psychological contract is that while the former is a written, legally binding contract, the latter is a theoretical, abstract construct that contains the mutual and implicit expectations of the parties. A psychological contract therefore falls into the category of "extra-legal" contracts, but in certain cases, especially in the event of breach of contract, it may have legal relevance.
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The Judicial Protection of the Basic Structure of the Constitution: the Practice of Judicial Review of Constitutional Amendments in India
132-148Views:125One of the rare but more prominent cases of judicial protection of the existing constitution is the revision of constitutional amendments. From among courts that review amendments, this study presents India’s Supreme Court’s practice, which is regarded as a model. India’s constitution does not contain any unamendable provisions or explicit authorization for judicial control over constitutional amendments, yet the court reviews constitutional amendments on grounds of protecting the constitution’s basic structure. India’s Supreme Court’s practice is a typical example of a court imposing an implicit limitation upon constitutional amendments. Therefore, before analyzing the basic structure doctrine, the study briefly examines the nature of the implicit limitations of constitutional amendments and some issues that may arise in their justification.
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Collective Redress in Certain States of Europe
84-106Views:162Collective redress mechanisms can be seen in almost all of European countries (except Switzerland and Czech Republic for example). The established regulatory solutions are diverse, basically two lines are typical, and mixed systems based on these are created. One is a representative collective claim enforceable to protect the collective interests of the community (public interest). In general, such claims can only be enforced by government bodies designated by a legislator or by associations whose purpose is the protection of those interests. Another type of collective demand assists the homogeneous demands of a group of individuals by taking advantage of the merged action. In these cases, a person is usually validated by the requirements of the group members, who is himself interested in the proceedings because of his own material right.
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One step back. The Hungarian Constitutional Court’s decision about the Liability of Commenting on the Internet
142-150Views:169Restrictions on the freedom of expression have been subject to mixed and constant debates. The debates are increasing in the case of free speech on the internet. In the recent past the Hungarian Constitutional Court had to examine this problem and contribute to the discourse. This article presents decision 19/2014 of the Hungarian Constitutional Court concerning the freedom of expression on the internet. The subject-matter of the case was the liability for the comments. The study intends to show the arguable points of the Court’s reasoning.
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Facebook files – is Hate Speech Deleted? The Human Rights As- pects of Content Control of Social Media Platforms
115-136Views:461The internet intermediaries, such as services like Google and Facebook became important actors who can influence the media supply through the personalised information flow tailored by their own algorithms and due to the content moderation of their own platforms. These services have exceeded their previous activities which were merely of an intermediary scope and this change affects substantially the fulfilment of international human rights standards. The article analysed first and foremost the operation of the internet intermediaries, especially of the social media platforms from the freedom of expression point of view. It seeks answers to the question to what extent does the moderation of the user generated content on the platforms, i.e. removing and blocking contents which do not comply with the terms and conditions of the platforms, comply with the requirements of the restriction of human rights. Based on the analysis of Facebook’s own regulatory framework, it evaluates content moderation activity on hate speech on the platform in the context of human rights. It points out the guarantees of human rights which are missing from the content control mechanisms of Facebook.
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The Criminal Provisions of the DDoS Attacks in the United States, Eu- rope and Hungary
66-83Views:326The Internet offers an opportunity to launch y wide range of cyberattacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which exploits the vulnerabilities of the system network without access. DDoS attacks continue to grow in intensity and complexity. Due to the Crime-as-a-Service business model and online criminal markets DDoS attacks have become accessible to anyone willing to pay for such services. It can be launched easily, although it may cause serious social and economic damage. The aim of this paper to present the criminal provisions of the DDoS attack in the United States, Europe and Hungary.