Radomir Lukić

Radomir Lukić: The Man Who Taught Yugoslavia Law

In 1971, taking his seat as a full member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Radomir Lukić delivered an accession speech titled "Basic Philosophical Issues of Law." It was an unremarkable-sounding title for a man in an unusual position: the leading legal theorist of a socialist state, teaching philosophy of law inside a system that officially held law to be a superstructure destined to wither away. He taught it for half a century anyway, and the Belgrade law faculty's main lecture hall now carries his name.

An Orphan From Miloševac

Lukić was born on 31 August 1914 in Miloševac, near Velika Plana in central Serbia, three weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. His parents died young and his childhood was, by the plain description in the record, a difficult one. Everything he subsequently acquired — languages, doctorates, an academy vice-presidency — he acquired without inherited advantage, which is worth stating because the trajectory that follows is otherwise implausibly fast.

The reference record gives 1933 for his Belgrade law degree, completed as an excellent student. If the date is right he finished at nineteen. He then went to Paris, and took his doctorate there in 1939 — the last possible year in which a young Serbian scholar could have completed a French doctorate before Europe closed.

Professor at Twenty-Six

He was appointed a professor at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Law at twenty-six, an age at which most academics are still finishing a first book. He became a full professor in 1956 and served as dean of the faculty from 1958 to 1960. His teaching load describes the breadth of his mind better than any summary could: Theory of State and Law, Philosophy of Law, General Sociology, and Methodology of Jurisprudence. He lectured abroad at Grenoble, Paris, Nice, Warsaw, Moscow and Cologne — a list that maps, precisely, the intellectual geography available to a Yugoslav academic during the Cold War, with a foot on each side of the line.

Between Marx and Kelsen

The intellectual problem that defined his career has been captured in the title of a later scholarly study of his work: Lukić's introduction to law sits *between Marx and Kelsen*. Those two names mark the poles of a genuine and difficult tension. Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law insists that legal science must be purged of politics, morality and sociology, and study norms as norms. Marxism insists that law is nothing but the codified interest of a ruling class. A jurist in socialist Yugoslavia had to teach in a state committed to the second while doing work that only makes sense on some version of the first.

Lukić's *Uvod u pravo* — his introduction to law — became the vehicle for that negotiation, and it went through edition after edition, which is why an entire scholarly article was later devoted to the intellectual history of a single textbook. Very few legal textbooks anywhere acquire that status. It happens when a book stops being a summary of a field and becomes the field's shared starting point.

The Sociologist Yugoslavia Did Not Yet Have

His other structural achievement was to write the first sociology textbook in the former Yugoslavia. This was not a matter of filling a gap on a syllabus. Sociology under state socialism was ideologically fraught precisely because it proposed to study society empirically rather than deduce it from doctrine, and the person who writes the first textbook in such a discipline is deciding what the discipline is permitted to be. Lukić made the same move in law: he pushed relentlessly toward the sociology of law — how legal norms actually operate among real people — rather than remaining safely in doctrinal exposition.

The Academy Years

He was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy on 21 December 1961 and a full member on 28 May 1970, then moved into its administration: Secretary of the Academy from December 1971 to December 1974, Vice-President from December 1974 to December 1977, and secretary of his department in 1981–82. He founded and chaired academy boards on the sources of Serbian law, on rural studies, and on the publication of the complete works of Svetozar Marković. The state decorated him with the Order of Labour with Red Banner in 1965 and the Order of Merit for the People with Golden Star in 1978.

Why Radomir Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on three things, and one of them is unusually strong. The first is precocity: a doctorate at Paris at twenty-four or twenty-five, a professorship at twenty-six, from an orphaned start in a Serbian village. The second is range — legal theory, philosophy of law, sociology, and methodology taught at professorial level simultaneously, at a time when each was becoming a separate profession. The third, and the most serious, is foundational authorship: he wrote both the textbook through which Yugoslav lawyers learned what law is and the first sociology textbook the country had. Founding two disciplines' entry points in one career is a specific and rare kind of intellectual work. It requires deciding, on your own authority, what a whole field's first principles are, and being right enough that nobody has to redo it.

The counter-case is on the record and comes from within Serbian scholarship. The legal scholar Dejan Matić, assessing Lukić's political theory of state and law, concluded that his interest in the relationship between politics, law and the state never produced a systematic, comprehensive work — and that while his legal-sociological analyses show real scientific rigour, his political theory of the state was significantly weakened by ideological constraint. That is a fair and damaging verdict. Lukić was a great synthesiser, teacher and institution-builder who worked inside limits he could not publicly test, and the parts of his thought that touched power are the parts that aged worst. Genius of exposition and synthesis: yes. Genius of original theory: the evidence does not support it.

Legacy

Lukić died in Belgrade on 31 May 1999 and was buried at Velika Plana, where a memorial bust stands before the municipal courthouse. The University of Belgrade Faculty of Law established the Radomir Lukić Foundation and named its principal amphitheatre after him — the room in which he had taught. That is the appropriate monument. His influence was never exercised through a single landmark treatise; it was exercised through the fact that for decades, in Belgrade and across Yugoslavia, the first serious answer a law student received to the question "what is law?" was his. Systems of government in that part of Europe have changed twice since he began teaching. The textbook outlasted them.

Achievements

• Held posts at University of Belgrade Faculty of Law and Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
• Fields: jurisprudence, sociology and law