Accident in the Tribunal Practice of Csanád County during the Hungarian Reform Era

Abstract

Given that Hungarian criminal law before 1848 can be described as typically customary law, it requires the exploration of court practices (the examination of documents in the archives) for one to become acquainted with the criminal law applied by them. This period is the first attempt in Hungary to create legal terminology. From 1806 onwards, the language of first-tier jurisdiction gradually became Hungarian in several counties (e.g. Csanád County), and the previous, relatively uniform Latin system of terms “disintegrated”. Counties began to write their own dictionaries (1806–1807) and create new Hungarian words to replace the Latin terms. Court records named crimes with excessive diversity, which is even more conspicuous in the categories of legal dogmatics. During the 1810s, culpa dolo determinata also appears in the legal science of the era. Several Hungarian terms can be observed replacing dolus and culpa; one such term is “accident’. The analysis of three legal cases (1808, 1811, 1821) leads to the conclusion that the tribunal treated “accident” as the opposite of wilful intent. In one case, it features in the sentence given for prater-intentional manslaughter, and therefore it was presumably used as the Hungarian equivalent of culpa.

Keywords

• customary law
• csanád county
• reform-era
• culpability
• accident
• culpa
• legal terminology