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

In this paper, Eugen Ehrlich’s notion of living law is presented as a concept of multi-normativity. The culturally pluralist character of his home province, Bukovina, led Ehrlich – rightly considered a pioneer not only of the sociology of law, but also of legal pluralism and qualitative social research – to empirically explore the legal customs of its different ethnic groups as actually practised. 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 scrutiny. In fact, as shown by an analysis of the monarchy’s legal statistics (that are hitherto practically unused for historical or sociological studies) and contemporary media accounts, the Bukovina witnessed an extraordinarily high litigation rate. Apart from precarious economic conditions, this was most likely an unintended consequence of civil procedural reforms. Given the Bukovina’s figurative meaning in current socio-legal discourses on law and globalisation, a proper understanding of this demand for state justice, as well as its coexistence with multiple societal normativities, is not only of historical interest.