Funding: OTKA
Duration: September 1, 2018 — August 31, 2021 (35 months)

How laws react to new challenges arising from the social, economic, or scientific development fields is the scope of the project “How does the law adapt, resist and learn?” The analysis of the reactivity and responsiveness of the legal system is new and has evolved in related research, but has shown little influence in the Hungarian legal system. What would be the most important non-legal challenges in the past eight years and what are their surrounding legal environment and response is a gap that the project fills.

In response to the legal system’s complexity, Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz has chosen mixed methods. For analyzing the responsiveness of law, an overview of the legislative acts, the judicial and administrative bodies’ practices dictated the use of quantitative analysis together with traditional legal methodology. Data will be gathered to gauge numbers, length, and dynamics of legal change. But despite the specific method chosen for each legal field, she will carry out doctrinal analysis to assess them. This will let the researcher classify legal accommodation or assimilation.

The project is timely because it covers almost a decade of legal changes. That matters because results, which will be published in articles for scientific journals and volumes in Hungary and abroad, will bring to light how the Hungarian legal system has developed in response to social, political, economic or technology change. That means that the research offers a tantalizing glimpse of how important demands of different branches of law are met; why some of them succeed while others do not uphold. These answers can help policymakers look for alternative policy solutions which can make legal-political reforms effective.

Principal investigator (PI):

Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz   Senior Research Fellow  Researcher profile page   Contact the PI