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8 Rev. Socialist L. 207 (1982)
The Catholic Church, Dissent and Nationality in Soviet Lithuania

handle is hein.journals/rsl8 and id is 207 raw text is: Vergleichende Rechtsgeschichte; Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Methodik. By Pil Horvith. Budapest: Akad6miai Kiad6, 1979. 363pp. ISBN 963-05-1578-4. This book deserves a mention on these pages because it is devoted to Hun- garian legal history. It is not an ordinary treatise on the history of Hungarian law, but a history of legal history in Hungary in the context of European phi- losophy and legal theory. It discusses legal historical thinking during the last two centuries, with special emphasis on Central and East European scholarship. F.F. The Catholic Church, Dissent and Nationality in Soviet Lithuania. By V. Stan- ley Vardys. East European Monographs, No.XLIII. Boulder, East Euro- pean Quarterly, 1978. xiii, 336p. Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 0-914710-36-2. This work traces the development of relations between church and state in Lithuania from the beginings of Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries. The emphasis is on the Soviet era and particularly on the years 1968-1978, when widespread religious and nationalist dissatisfaction came to the surface. The book deserves a mention in this journal because its seventh chapter analyzes the legal framework of church-state relations in the USSR, and especially in Lithuania. An appendix contains the most important enactments concerning this subject, including a translation of the Statute on Religious Associations of the Lithuanian SSR of 28 July 1976. F.F. The Constitutions of the Communist World. Edited by William B. Simons. Alphen aan den Rijn, The Netherlands: Sijthoff & Noordhoff International Publishers, 1980. xvii, 644pp. Dfl. 185.00. ISBN 90-286-0070-1. This is a valuable book. It contains texts of current constitutions of the fif- teen communist party-states - Albania, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czecho- slovakia (as amended), East Germany, Hungary, Kampuchea, North Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia - each prefaced with a brief explanatory introduction. A comparative index, painstakingly arranged according to the respective constitutional structures and functions in eighteen charts at the end of the volume, is a brilliant idea: it permits a detailed across-the-board comparison of the provisions contained in the fifteen constitutions, thus opening the way to a truly comprehensive contstitutional comparative analysis. This thoughtful update of the communist party-states' constitutions (the previous version was published by Hoover Institution in 1968) is an important service to the profession. The continuation of the constitutional growth in the second world, which this volume displays, is an affirmation of the latent propensity of the formal, legal order to impress itself upon the arbitrary po- litical decision-making process in the Communist party-states. The search for greater social stability anchored in more equitable legal security of social en- deavor appears to go on and confirms the empirical indicators emanating from many of those countries, especially in Eastern Europe. As I put it fourteen years ago: Should past justifications for the monopoly of the rule by the parties' elites continue to evaporate - as this writer thinks they will - the