Litigious Bukovina: Eugen Ehrlich’s ›Living Law‹ and the Use of Civil Justice in the Late Habsburg Monarchy

The Austrian jurist Eugen Ehrlich (1862–1922) is considered not only one of the founders of the sociology of law but also a pioneer of legal pluralism. As a matter of fact, he conceptually and empirically analysed the coexistence of different normative orders within one and the same society. Ehrlich was born the son of a Jewish lawyer in Czernowitz, ⁽¹⁾ then capital of the Bukovina, a crown land of the Habsburg Empire at its eastern periphery, where he later worked as professor of Roman law. ⁽²⁾ Like the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy itself – against whose dissolution Ehrlich passionately argued for pacifist reasons at the end of the First World War ⁽³⁾ – the Bukovina and Czernowitz were characterised by an enormous ethnic, cultural and social diversity. ⁽⁴⁾

As Ehrlich noticed in his brief treatise »The Living Law of the Peoples in the Bukovina«, this pluralist situation also had implications for legal matters:

In the Duchy of Bukovina, nine tribes are currently living side by side, partly even still quite peacefully: Armenians, Germans, Jews, Romanians, Russians (Lipovans), Rutenes, Slovaks (who are often counted among the Poles), Hungarians, Gypsies. A legal expert of the traditional direction would undoubtedly claim that all these peoples have only one, and exactly the same, Austrian law, which is valid throughout Austria. And yet even a cursory glance could convince him that each of these tribes observes quite different legal rules in all legal relations of daily life. […] I have decided to survey the living law of the nine tribes of the Bukovina in my seminar for living law. ⁽⁵⁾

Ehrlich coined the term living law for these »quite different« norms that are actually relevant to everyday action. As he theoretically outlined in his monograph »Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law«, this legal corpus is nothing else than the »inner order of the associations of human beings«. ⁽⁶⁾ According to Ehrlich, however, associations are not only ethnic communities, but all groups of people »who, in their relations with one another, recognise certain rules of conduct as binding, and, generally at least, actually regulate their conduct according to them« ⁽⁷⁾ – whether they are families, religious organisations, clubs, companies, professional or social classes, or even states. In its reference to observable social phenomena of multi-normativity, the concept of ›living law‹ goes far beyond the related socio-legal concept of law in action (as opposed to law in the books) by Roscoe Pound, with which it is sometimes confused: ⁽⁸⁾ Living law is not only – possibly inconsistently – applied statutory or case law, but it can refer to rules that need not have anything to do with the set, legitimised and enforced norms of the state. The state is only one of many social associations that are not afforded any priority whatsoever with regard to the emergence of effective legal rules. The »center of gravity of legal development lies« therefore, as Ehrlich writes in the foreword to his main work, »not in legislation, nor in juristic science, nor in judicial decision, but in society itself «. ⁽⁹⁾

Consequently, Ehrlich acknowledged the existence of societal legal norms, which he understood to be more than mere customs, even when they contradicted state laws – such as, e.g. certain patriarchal social structures in rural Bukovina:

The family law of the Austrian Civil Code, as is well known, is extremely individualistic […] Only so long as the child is a minor is it under the power of his or her father; but the father, the bearer of this power, is not much more than a guardian. […] In Bukowina, however, although it is a part of Austria, and although the Civil Code is in force there as well as in the other parts of Austria, the power of the father is an extremely serious matter. The Roumanian peasant, perhaps the only true Roman of our day, exercises a patria potestas, which seems strikingly familiar to the student of Roman law. There the children actually belong to the father […] And if one asks why the children submit so docilely, the answer is that resistance is something unheard of. Ever since I directed attention to this phenomenon […], I have again and again received the reply that those things that are in conflict with the Civil Code are ethical custom, not law. This reply is based on the same old idea, to wit that we are here dealing with a question of terminology, i.e. with the question just what it is to be called law. But we are here dealing with something quite different from this, i.e. with the fact that the Austrian Civil Code has not been able to root out this custom, which is in such decided conflict with the Code – irrespective of whether we call it law or ethical custom. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Notwithstanding their intrinsic normative quality, Ehrlich regarded such social rules as, at any rate, a highly relevant subject matter of legal science. ⁽¹¹⁾ As the statement just quoted shows, he was not overly concerned with terminological issues. However, Ehrlich did propose a distinctive feature of legal norms. In order to ascribe a legal character to a rule, he considers the type of ›emotional tone‹ that its violation triggers: In contrast to mere reactions of anger, disapproval or ridicule, which follow transgressions of custom, tact or fashion, a breach of the law typically entails feelings of outrage. ⁽¹²⁾ Therefore, not the ›sources‹ of norms, but the psychological and social consequences of deviant behaviour, are decisive to differentiate law from other social norms. Meanwhile, Ehrlich considers the significance of the state’s coercive power, in which most legal theoretical approaches still see a necessary prerequisite – if not a key defining element – of the legal system, to be quite low. According to him, societal order is not based on the enforceability of legal obligations, but rather on the fact that these are mostly fulfilled – in economic life, for instance, simply in order to maintain one’s own creditworthiness. ⁽¹³⁾

Ehrlich considered it one task of jurisprudence to empirically examine the law that is actually practised in society. From 1909 until the outbreak of the First World War, he held his »Seminar for Living Law« at the University of Czernowitz, in which he and his students researched – through excursions to farming villages and commercial enterprises and by analysing legal documents – those rules that were actually significant in legal transactions. ⁽¹⁴⁾ In order to study the ethnically diverse legal customs of rural Bukovina, he designed a comprehensive questionnaire. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Despite the fact that (or because) it was aimed at investigating »the law which dominates life itself even though it has not been posited in legal propositions«, ⁽¹⁶⁾ the topics of this survey instrument went far beyond legal matters in the narrower sense. Among other things, Ehrlich asked about the self-construction of the respective national identity, about rules of exogamy and endogamy, parenting styles, actual power relations within families, concrete matrimonial property regimes, legal relationships with regard to land and houses (including details concerning the handling of scattered fields, such as easements and rules of compulsory crop rotation), typical terms of labour and lease contracts (including whether the rent is paid in kind), practices of inheritance and the use of arbitration and litigation. A few selected questions may illustrate the style of the inquiry:

Whom does the people consider belonging to their nation? Is it the descent that counts? The creed? How does one behave towards baptized Jews? […] What does a man think he can do to his wife? Does he forbid her to go out, to visit the inn, to associate with friends, with male acquaintances? […] What does the woman think she is allowed to do to her husband? Does he obey her orders? […] Are there cruelties against the children? Does the neighbour intervene in such a case? […] What rights does the leaseholder have? Can he grow what he wants or only certain types of crop? […] Who draws up wills in the country? The village scribes? The priest? Are there any effectual oral wills? ⁽¹⁷⁾

Ehrlich’s research programme can be regarded as an ambitious blueprint for cultural-anthropological and socio-legal field studies. What is more, by prudently instructing his students »that it does not depend on what the interviewees say, because this will often only be their own moral conviction« ⁽¹⁸⁾ and instead advising them to carefully interpret the answers in the context of their own observations, he even anticipated methodological principles of ethnographic and qualitative social research. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Nevertheless, the results of the participants’ seminar papers were, as Ehrlich remarked in an expertise for the German Jurist’s Council in 1912, obviously quite modest. Apart from the »difficulty of the task« and the »unfamiliar work«, his often-economically struggling students seemed to have much more interest in living a typical ›Austrian dream‹ rather than doing pioneering scientific fieldwork, namely to succeed in getting a secure job in the state bureaucracy as quickly as possible. ⁽²⁰⁾ In any case, the exemplary research findings that Ehrlich reports – details of orally concluded lease agreements for arable land, hayfields and sheep pastures (with salt left over from cheese production for the cereal mash as a reward for shepherds) ⁽²¹⁾ – point to a pre-modern social and economic order. Consequently, Ehrlich has been blamed for having confused ›dying‹ with ›living‹ law. ⁽²²⁾ However, he was well aware that it would be more important to study »the viable seeds of a new law« ⁽²³⁾ in modern life than the (then still practised yet vanishing) remains of an ancient customary law. His choice of study objects had mainly didactic reasons: As he considered »eyes to see and ears to hear« ⁽²⁴⁾ the most important ability of a jurist, he wanted to teach his students »to perceive the world with their own senses«. ⁽²⁵⁾ Had he worked on a different, economically more-advanced place, he would have let studied, for instance, the living law of »the grain trade or the shipping company, the large estate, the sugar or chemical industry«. ⁽²⁶⁾ At »the site of a developed industry, a staple of world trade, a centre of banking transactions, it goes without saying that these areas should mainly be taken into account«. ⁽²⁷⁾

More than a century after the publication of Ehrlich’s treatise on the Bukovina, the German legal scholar, Gunnar Folke Schuppert, has called this historical regional entity »a virtual Mecca for legal sociologists«. ⁽²⁸⁾ Why should this territory, which was divided between the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and Romania after the Second World War, ⁽²⁹⁾ still be of interest for present-day social researchers with other than historical purposes? To answer this question, a distinct branch of Ehrlich’s reception has to be outlined. In general, the appraisal of his legacy in the field of socio-legal studies turned out mixed. ⁽³⁰⁾ Since his polemical controversy with Hans Kelsen, ⁽³¹⁾ Ehrlich was repeatedly accused of mixing up facts (is) and norms (ought) – or, to be more precise, the tasks of a descriptive sociology of law and an ultimately normative, albeit empirically informed sociological jurisprudence. While his role as a founding figure for both intellectual enterprises is beyond doubt, many scholars – often insisting on state-centred definitions – have questioned the validity and usefulness of his far-reaching concept of law. ⁽³²⁾ Even Niklas Luhmann, whose notion of the society’s legal system (as encompassing all acts of communication that refer to the difference between lawfulness and unlawfulness) is also very broad, deemed it »unclear« and considered Ehrlich’s research »inadequately founded in theory«. According to him, the Bukovinian professor’s work »has alarmed jurists, yet not particularly impressed sociologists«. ⁽³³⁾

However, it was precisely the fuzzy, fluid, open, chaotic and decentralised nature of Ehrlich’s concept of living law that attracted a new generation of academics engaging in critical or postmodern discourses, ⁽³⁴⁾ who were interested in situations where »two or more legal systems coexist in the same social field«. ⁽³⁵⁾ In a seminal paper from 1986, the American jurist John Griffiths presented Ehrlich as a forebear of what he called a »descriptive conception of legal pluralism« being suitable to challenge dominant ideologies of »legal centralism« underpinning »the moral and political claims of the modern nation state« in favour of a better understanding of legal reality as »an unsystematic collage of inconsistent and overlapping parts«. ⁽³⁶⁾ Ten years later, the German legal scholar Gunther Teubner attracted international attention with an article named »Global Bukowina«. Given Luhmann’s rather derogatory comments on Ehrlich, it is not without a certain irony that the systems theoretician Teubner used the home of »the almost forgotten law professor from Czernowitz« ⁽³⁷⁾ as allegory for an innovative account of law beyond the state in a functionally differentiated and globalised world society:

Ehrlich, of course, is romanticizing the law-creating role of customs, habits and practices in small-scale rural communities but, in the current globalization process, his living law seems to take on a different and quite dramatic significance relying on cold technical processes, no longer on warm communal bonds. Since it is not politics but civil society itself that drives us toward a globalization of its various fragmented discourses, the globalization of law is bound to follow as a spill-over effect of those developments. From this, the main thesis follows: global law will grow mainly from the social peripheries, not from the political centres of nation states and international institutions. A new living law growing out of fragmented social institutions which had followed their own paths to the global village seems to be the main source of global law. ⁽³⁸⁾

Stefan Kadelbach and Klaus Günther – obviously referring to Teubner – have even recently presented a taxonomy of legal pluralist phenomena in which they distinguish no less than three versions of ›Bukovina‹: a Bukovina (»private law without the state in a state«), an exotic Bukovina (»societal law without the state in a state«, e.g. indigenous law in colonial or postcolonial situations) and a global Bukovina (»law without the state outside the state«, in the sense of Teubner’s analysis of phenomena, such as the contemporary worldwide lex mercatoria). ⁽³⁹⁾ Interestingly enough, due to the reception of Ehrlich’s work, the Bukovina has finally become a metaphor for a law distant from the state in legal pluralist environments. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Accordingly, portrayals of Ehrlich in the sociology of law textbooks or overview articles usually ascribe his detection of living law to the actual insignificance of state structures in the easternmost province of the Habsburg monarchy. Following Stefan Machura, for instance, »the Austrian codified law, the topic learnt by students across the vast empire, was an irrelevant ›dead‹ law« in the Bukovina. ⁽⁴¹⁾ To a certain extent, such depictions of this region inevitably mirror ›orientalistic‹ discourses from the second half of the 19^th century describing the then-Austrian lands in today’s Poland, Ukraine and Romania as ›Half-Asia‹ (Karl-Emil Franzos), ⁽⁴²⁾ as a ›Far and Wild East‹, ⁽⁴³⁾ a region where the cultural (or, for that matter, legal) achievements of Western civilisation have not yet fully arrived. However, irrespective of Ehrlich’s undoubtedly outstanding accomplishment of having discovered and studied crucial patterns of societal legal practice, is it really true that Austrian state law was of no importance at all in his place of activity at his times?

Given Ehrlich’s remarks concerning the relative meaninglessness of the Austrian Civil Code in the Bukovina and the metaphoric equation of the latter with a legal sphere beyond the state in contemporary socio-legal discourses, one would expect very little demand for civil procedural remedies before state courts in the easternmost crown land of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed, in an 1867 speech by Adolf Ficker, the later president of the Central Commission of Statistics in Cisleithania, the Bukovina was mentioned (together with Galicia) as having by far the lowest civil trial rates of the entire state territory. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ As a matter of fact, the number of civil lawsuits per inhabitant in Ehrlich’s home province was consistently below the Austrian average until 1871. However, as Figure 1 shows, from the 1880s onwards, the Bukovina’s civil litigation rates were always considerably higher than in the rest of Cisleithania. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

Figure 1

Whereas the kink in the time series between 1873 and 1874 might be attributable to the then financial crisis (›Founders’ crash‹), ⁽⁴⁶⁾ the subsequent steep increase is most likely a consequence of the Law on the Small Claims Procedure (Gesetz über das Bagatellverfahren) which came into effect in autumn 1873. This statute, which anticipated the central principles of the later Code of Civil Procedure of 1895 (such as orality, ex officio proceedings or free consideration of evidence) ⁽⁴⁷⁾ significantly facilitated and accelerated the enforcement of minor monetary claims. ⁽⁴⁸⁾ This also applied to a second bill entering into force at the same date, the Law on the Dunning Procedure (Gesetz über das Mahnverfahren). Interestingly, however, the latter statute was not enacted in Galicia, Dalmatia and the Bukovina, because it was feared that the high level of illiteracy in these crown lands could trigger a misuse of the new procedural remedy. ⁽⁴⁹⁾

Apart from these legal prerequisites for the growing mobilisation of courts, however, next to nothing is known about the societal determinants of the Habsburg Empire’s spatially and temporally varying litigation rates. The Monarchy’s civil justice statistics – which are, compared to later standards, astonishingly rich – have attracted hardly any scientific attention at all, neither as a socio-legal data source nor as an object of historical scholarship in its own right. Since 1898, the year in which the new Code of Civil Procedure came into force, the litigation rates in Bukovina were on average 2.5 times higher than in the entire territory of the Austrian half of the empire. Figure 2 illustrates the geographical distribution of civil cases per population in 1910 by regional court districts. Apart from Bukovina, the demand for lawsuits was highest in Galicia, parts of Dalmatia and the metropolitan areas of Vienna and Trieste. By contrast, civil courts were least utilised in Upper Austria, Southern Bohemia and the Italian-language part of Tyrol. When the data are not classified by quantiles (left map), but by equal intervals (right map), the Bukovina’s saliently high litigation rate becomes all the more apparent. In 1912, a total of 269 lawsuits per 1,000 inhabitants was filed, which is remarkable by both historical and international standards of comparison. ⁽⁵⁰⁾

Figure 2

However, the overall socio-spatial pattern of civil court use defies straightforward economic or ›cultural‹ explanations. Although small claims before district courts made up a large part of the judges’ business volume in the Bukovina, proceedings before its regional courts in Czernowitz and Suczawa (with higher amounts in dispute) were also relatively heavily used. Only Vienna and Lemberg had higher rates of lawsuits before regional courts. In general, as Figure 3 (left plot) shows, these rates were strongly correlated with the amount of civil cases before district courts per population. There is also a very clear statistical association between the regional court litigation rate and the density of attorneys (right plot in Figure 3). ⁽⁵¹⁾ The number of lawyers per population in the Bukovina was no less than in many administrative and economic centres of the Monarchy. This is certainly not least a consequence of the foundation of a University in Czernowitz in 1875, at whose law faculty Ehrlich held his professorship since 1897. In any case, the law of the Austrian Civil Code, which after all had to be the legal basis of any procedural enforcement of private claims, was definitely not entirely ›dead‹ or ›absent‹ in the Bukovina of his times.

Figure 3

What were the reasons for the surprisingly high demand for civil justice in the Bukovina? Although it is beyond the scope of this article to address this question in a comprehensive manner, a quick glance at contemporary discourses might provide some hints. First of all, it is interesting to see that the official statistical publications themselves offered hardly any explanation for the regional disparities that they had so meticulously displayed in numerous tables. Rather, their focus was to prove the – politically intended – effectiveness and expeditiousness of the new civil procedure. ⁽⁵²⁾ However, before the new Code of Civil Procedure came into force in 1898, it was discussed whether one could now also apply the Law on the Dunning Procedure in Galicia and the Bukovina, which was ultimately denied. ⁽⁵³⁾ The Permanent Committee on the Code of Civil Procedure pointed to the high caseload of these provinces, explaining it through unspecified »agrarian, social and national conditions«, as well as »the character of the rural population, which tends to litigiousness« (Prozesssucht, literally meaning »addiction to litigation«). ⁽⁵⁴⁾ The attribution of a litigious temperament to certain parts of the population – usually to underprivileged peasants or Jews – in the Eastern lands of the Austrian Empire was, often, rendered together with complaints about hack lawyers (Winkelschreiber), a topos also present in parliamentary debates and newspaper reports of the time. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ Aside from ethnic or (at least subtle) anti-Semitic stereotypes, ⁽⁵⁶⁾ however, several media accounts also covered discussions of the Bukovina’s unfavourable economic and social conditions that might have given rise to the extraordinarily high numbers of lawsuits. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ In 1909, for instance, the Bukovinian German language daily newspaper Czernowitzer Tagblatt published a five-pages-long article containing the results of a survey among judges and advocates on the »overburdening« of the courts. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ Judges in the districts of Czernowitz and Suczawa indeed faced a heavy caseload, even though their number was relatively high in relation to the population size. As Figure 4 illustrates, the litigation rate was only moderately associated with the density of judges (left plot) but highly correlated with the number of civil cases per judge (right plot).

Figure 4

The participants in the newspaper’s probe were asked about the reasons for the judges’ high caseload. Apart from obvious conditions of scarce human resources, some respondents mentioned socioeconomic causes for the heavy reliance on civil justice and drew a vivid picture of pauperism in the Bukovina. According to them, many of the region’s inhabitants experienced difficulty earning a living. The lack of any noteworthy industrial structures obviously caused a massive shortage of capital mostly affecting the smallholding farmers. For every wedding or funeral in their often-large families, they had to raise a loan from private lenders on disadvantageous terms or sell a small piece of land, which further contributed to the already-existing inefficient fragmentation of real estate property. The latter triggered numerous boundary disputes, the more so as many transactions were not properly recorded in the land title register – following a ›living‹ legal custom of oral land sales. This, in turn, could be utilised by speculators who bought registered parcels in order to sue the unofficial owners. What is more, the high illiteracy rate ⁽⁵⁹⁾ offered business opportunities for middlemen, considerably complicating seemingly simple economic and legal relations. Finally, the law faculty in Czernowitz seemed to produce too many graduates, many of whom becoming attorneys faced with fierce competition.

From a sociological point of view, it is tempting to analyse these circumstances in (Durkheimian) terms of anomie and thus interpreting the high litigation rate as a sign of societal disintegration in times of rapid socioeconomic change. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ However, even if such an approach may provide a useful theoretical link between certain types of legal behaviour and more general social conditions in a specific historical situation, one should not overlook one apparently trivial yet crucial prerequisite for the massive mobilisation of civil courts: As the lawyers interviewed by the newspaper also stressed, it was ultimately the civil procedural law itself that enabled its widespread application. Although the introduction of quick and cheap proceedings in Austria is often seen as a decisive step away from a ›liberal‹ towards a ›social‹ model of civil procedure, ⁽⁶¹⁾ its establishment most likely yielded unintended and rather adverse societal consequences in the monarchy’s eastern provinces. After all, the Bukovina was not simply a multi-tribal ›wild east‹ but rather, as Klemens Kaps has argued for Galicia, ⁽⁶²⁾ a culturally and legally sufficiently integrated – ›semi-peripheral‹ – zone whose economic backwardness nevertheless served a function within the Habsburg Empire’s division of labour.

At first sight, the strikingly high civil litigation rates in the Bukovina of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’s latest decades are difficult to reconcile with Ehrlich’s simultaneously developed findings on the indigenous living law of the region’s different peoples. When Ehrlich dismissed the law of the Austrian Civil Code as relatively meaningless in his home province, did he overlook an important aspect of legal practice that must have had a significant impact on daily social life? First of all, it is important to note that some features of the ancient rural customary law may in fact have amplified the mobilisation of state courts, at least against the background of economically deteriorating circumstances, namely the habit of purely oral transactions (even on land sales) in a widely illiterate yet multilingual society. Furthermore, even though Ehrlich mentioned litigation and arbitration in his questionnaire, it had a relatively strong focus on family matters, which in fact could hardly be controlled by the state’s enlightened liberal statutory civil law at all – probably not only in the Bukovina, but also on Dalmatian islands or in the Upper Austrian hills, in Tyrolian side valleys or, for that matter, in aristocratic palaces or in the crowded proletarian outskirts of Vienna. Moreover, due to his theoretical focus on actually practised private law, Ehrlich may simply not have been very interested in the enforcement of rights before state courts. When dispute arises in one out of hundred transactions and a lawsuit is filed during one out of hundred justiciable disputes, ⁽⁶³⁾ 99.99% of all transactions and 99% of all justiciable disputes are handled without any judicial intervention. Even if the mobilisation of courts quintuples, 99.95% of all transactions and 95% of all justiciable conflicts resulting out of them still run without any involvement of a judge. Having directed scientific attention to this overwhelming majority of legal reality is unquestionably one of Ehrlich’s great sociological achievements. Nevertheless, the concretistic and private-law-oriented character of his understanding of law’s role in society may have led him to underestimate both the material and symbolic force of state law. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ Even if transactions gone wrong were certainly rather exceptional cases in the Bukovina as well, they resulted in >125,000 execution procedures in a province of 800,000 inhabitants in 1910. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ It should be borne in mind that incidents of conflict and unlawfulness are constitutive elements of how law is perceived and experienced. ⁽⁶⁶⁾

However, Ehrlich was well aware of the difficult social conditions that most likely gave rise to the enormous penchant for litigation in the Bukovina. In one of his political essays, ⁽⁶⁷⁾ he relentlessly analysed the region’s economic and political predicaments and complained about the career aspirations of privileged young people, who, in his opinion, all too often sought to become lawyers instead of enriching the national wealth by productive entrepreneurship. Although he devoted several pages to what he explicitly called »the Jewish question«, he sharply rejected the explanations for the harsh living conditions of the Bukovina in general, and its Jewish population in particular, that relied on any racial, religious or national character. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ Passionately protesting against anti-Semitism (»this not very clever student’s prank« ⁽⁶⁹⁾) and arguing for industrialisation of the province, he insisted on historical and economic reasons for the challenges that many rural and Jewish inhabitants faced. What is more, Ehrlich also knew about the emergence of litigious legal practices. Interestingly enough, in a 1911 treatise on living law (the text of which he partly included in his »Fundamental Principles«), he mentioned them in the context of a critique of the official legal statistic’s epistemological interest:

In this paper, Eugen Ehrlich’s notion of living law was introduced as a concept of multi-normativity. The culturally pluralist character of his home province, Bukovina, led Ehrlich to empirically explore the legal customs of its different ethnic groups as actually practised. With his approach to the study of law’s role in society, Ehrlich is rightly considered a pioneer not only of the sociology of law but also of legal pluralism and qualitative social research. As Ehrlich stressed the role of private societal legal transactions, his place of activity became a metaphor for a law beyond the state. However, the textbook narrative that Austrian state law has been ›dead‹ in the easternmost crown land of the Habsburg Empire does not stand up to closer historical and sociological scrutiny. In fact, the Bukovina, in which a law faculty was established in 1875, witnessed an extraordinarily high litigation rate during the monarchy’s last decades. Apart from precarious economic conditions, this situation was most likely an unintended consequence of civil procedural reforms. Plaintiffs actually used the new opportunities for the enforcement of legal claims, »often appropriating them for their own purposes or reinterpreting them to fit their interests«, ⁽⁷¹⁾ as Pieter Judson has generally observed for the relationships between the Habsburg monarchy’s imperial institutions and its various local societies. Given the Bukovina’s figurative meaning in current socio-legal discourses on law and globalisation, a proper understanding of such dynamics, as well as their coexistence with multiple societal normativities, is not only of historical interest. In this way, the Bukovina might continue to be a ›Mecca for legal sociologists‹.