From Legal Ambiguity to Lawmaking: The Evolution of Courts in 1920s Soviet Georgia

• In Event: Legality and Justice in the Caucasus, 1850-1930

Abstract

In the early 1920s, “justice” and the creation of a unified legal system became tools for the consolidation of Soviet power across the republics. To achieve this, the Soviet system needed to promote legal education and practices locally. According to early Soviet-Georgian jurists, the imperial justice system had mostly been inaccessible to the masses. In their view, the revolution transformed the law into a means of liberation. Data on the social background of court officials were used to show that revolutionaries had begun to lead the judiciary. People’s judges, representing workers, peasants, artisans, and the intelligentsia, were believed to understand local problems and lifeworlds. Crucially, they administered justice in Georgian, making it indeed more accessible to the people. This paper shows that the newly established, undemocratic legislature would soon rely on court decisions to develop legislation. Verdicts were intended to serve as precedents for future laws. In addition to law-enforcement, the early Soviet Georgian judiciary thus came to shape the process of lawmaking. To understand the legal confusion and lawmaking process on the periphery of the Soviet system, the paper offers a critical reading of sources published in Georgian: court hearings, statistics, and legal discussions from the specialized journal “Soviet Law” (sabchota samartali) (1926-1929) and the newspaper “Communist” (komunisti) (1926-1930), both published in Tbilisi.

Author

• Ketevan Sartania, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Germany)