Andras Jakab. “Informal Institutional Elements as Both Preconditions and Consequences of Effective Formal Legal Rules: The Failure of Constitutional Institution Building in Hungary.” The American Journal of Comparative Law, vol. 68, no. 4 (2020): 760-800.
Lawyers in post-socialist countries do not see law through institutionalist lenses, but often nurture a false and simplistic idea of the law: they consider it to be the sum of rules, often disregarding the actual practices of the rules’ addressees and the narratives attached to the law. This restricted view makes Hungarian lawyers blind and to a certain extent also defenseless against recent authoritarian tendencies. Institution building has been a moderately successful feat in Hungary. To put it more pessimistically, it has partially failed since the end of socialism, in particular when it comes to actual practices and narratives…
Of course, the current problems present in the Hungarian legal system are not primarily caused by rule fixation. They are in fact partly a result of general cultural problems (of which rule fixation is only a small part, which is characteristic of lawyers), and partly a result of the concrete individual or collective decisions taken by politicians—I will come back to this point later. However, blindness to these problems and the ensuing intellectual defenselessness of lawyers may largely be explained by the phenomenon of rule fixation.