Dunja Pastović

The authors approach the topic of editing and publishing primary legal-historical sources from the perspective of Croatian legal history as an academic discipline. Based on the earlier texts by Jakov Stipišić and Ivan Filipović, the first part of the text discusses several possible approaches towards the editing and publishing of documents, showing that critical intellectual activity is required already when the initial scope and mode of selecting and preparing the sources is decided upon. As a consequence, editing and publishing priorities are more or less directly connected to the particular interests and general methodological presumptions shared by the archivists, librarians and (legal) historians of a given society. The second part of the text – based on the works of Stjepan Antoljak, Zrinka Nikolić-Jakus, Mladen Ančić and personal insight – is thus dedicated to the most significant or illustrative (either in a positive or a negative way) source-editing and publishing projects on what is today the territory of the Republic of Croatia, in as much as some of them were influenced not only by strictly scientific, but also by political or ideological reasons. Pre-modern as well as modern and recent legal acts and other historical sources, including those typical of popular oral culture, are taken into account here. Finally, the authors reflect on the possible future of great editing projects, fearing that digitalization is only an incomplete answer to the precarious status of humanities and (historic) social sciences.

The paper examines the process of the unification of substantive and procedural criminal law in the Yugoslav state during the interwar period. Despite its unitary and centralistic administrative organization, the Yugoslav state at the time was characterized by legal particularism. Among the territories that encompassed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes there were substantially different legal systems, and hence, considerably diverse sources of law, since they had been parts of different political and territorial units prior to the unification. After the unification, there were six criminal codes and equally as many codes of criminal procedure in force in the territory of the Kingdom. Reformation and unification of substantive and procedural criminal law became an inevitable task, which was regarded as being urgent because achieving the standardization of the legal system was considered as a step forward, which would facilitate and solidify the unity and the proclaimed centralism that the state sought. Despite the initial efforts towards unification of criminal law that were begun by the beginning of 1919, the process was nevertheless turbulent, slow-going, and inefficient. Such circumstances were deeply conditioned by the permanent political instability, which emerged from continuous changes in the person of the Minister of Justice that always occurred in very short periods. The unification of criminal law was finally achieved only after the proclamation of the Dictatorship in 1929.