Article by Christopher Osakwe
The modern Soviet law of torts, the quintessence of Soviet socialist morality, is secreted in the interstices of Soviet criminal law. Its technical rules have looked very much like their Romanist counterparts since the civil law reforms of 1961, but its public policy aspects continue to differ radically from the public policy considerations underlying the law of torts of any Western legal system.
The present state of Soviet tort law may be attributed to a protracted evolutionary process that only culminated in the codification of 1961. Prior to that time, the law of torts was conceived as an appendage to the law of social insurance and, more importantly, as an instrument of class struggle. But the same invisible hands of social forces that forced the Bolsheviks in 1922 to recognize a separate law of private wrongs, much to their distaste, also forced the more sophisticated Soviet lawmakers of the 1960's to move away from the earlier class approach to tort law and to adopt the general principles of torts recognized by the major legal systems of the modern world. This study proposes to trace the Soviet law of torts from its infancy to its present state of adolescence. In this scheme, the emphasis will be on the modern law, and only fleeting reference will be made to the pre-1961 state of that law.
About the Author
Christopher Osakwe. Director, Tulane Institute of Comparative Law; Professor of Law, Tulane University. LL.B. 1966, LL.M. 1967, Ph.D. 1970, Moscow State University; J.S.D. 1974, University of Illinois.
Citation
54 Tul. L. Rev. 3 (1979)