The lawyer's profession and bankruptcies

Bankruptcies play an important role in the economic and even social life of human coexistence. In the latter case, it is enough to say that if one of Count István Széchenyi's aristocratic companions had not become insolvent, we would be one Hitel poorer. A systematic examination of these bankruptcies (in this case, those of 1869) provides an interesting perspective on the history of the legal profession. You could say that each bankruptcy is unique, but there is something that links these lawsuits. The lawyers. (In the Vienna-related cases, there are also notaries, but in 1869 this profession was already and had not yet been established in our country - I will ignore them for the moment.) If you like, we can see the whole world of bankruptcy through lawyers. The words of the characters are mostly the words of their lawyers, sometimes even their signatures, not to mention their thought processes. It may even be that behind the lawyer's words there is no longer a living person, but a dead person whose estate has been placed in receivership, for example when a murdered sewing machine dealer is being placed in receivership.^[1]

Instead of personalities, they are personas in the original sense of the word, masks. But this does not mean that the actors of bankruptcies are reduced to mere individuals with the rationality and rational selfishness of homo economici. Rather, we can speak of the exploitation of the potential of the roles. In the course of the research, it is already apparent that a carnal struggle of perceptions is taking place through the lawyers. A struggle in which lawyers everywhere fight each other as mercenaries. Lawyer is the litigator, lawyer is the bailiff, lawyers are often the members of the jury, and of course they are overwhelmingly the proxies of the parties. But there is a difference in the way they are addressed and called. Whether or not the lawyer is a doctor, whether or not he is sworn, whether or not he is a public and exchange lawyer, and whether or not he has this qualification. Although the titles are mixed, even for the same lawyer, the uncertainty is telling. There is no such thing as a collegiate structure; we are faced with professionals with different backgrounds and ambitions.

This in itself suggests that an important by-product of the research may be to increase our knowledge of the lawyer's profession. Unfortunately, the literature is not very rich, and a social history of the legal profession - despite a recent work on the history of chambers and a historical-sociological study - is still to be written.^[2] What is certainly striking is that the values of the legal process have oscillated between fairness and consistency between Scylla and Kharübdis. The lawyer's manifestations were also very different. It is not only a question of rhetoric, but also of appearance. Thanks to the writing process, it is possible to distinguish between pleadings written by professional scribes and those written by lawyers themselves, and even among these we find some writing which may cast doubt on whether the lawyer in question could write at all. We can only speculate - for the moment I suspect that some of the lawyers may have been elderly and ill, and that this may have prevented them from writing.

It is extraordinary that a public and exchange lawyer in his late thirties has turned up among the wealthy, and that he has been the subject of a criminal prosecution.^[3] It is hoped that these punitive procedures will allow for a confrontation of roles and personalities through the future analysis of the remaining testimonies. On the basis of his testimony, it cannot be ruled out that the deceased was in a state of moral insanity. He forged bills of exchange for being a bill of exchange lawyer. The names of the signatories, László Ilosvay, Johan Falkenstein and Karl Rottenbiller, were written on the bills of exchange - the names (the first one refers to a noble origin, the middle one could be that of a person from a Jewish milieu, the last one suggests a citizen of Pest) could be the subject of a separate study. Although the bankrupt lawyer was imprisoned for a long time on suspicion of fraud, the need to preserve his honour helped him out: his father-in-law came to the aid of the lawyer and his wife.

[1] BFLIV. 1343. j. III/2 (1869): Spath Adolf

[2] Korsósné Delacasse Krisztina: Az ügyvédi kamarák megszületése Magyarországon. Budapest–Pécs: Dialóg Campus, 2012.; Navratil Szonja: A jogászi hivatásrendek története Magyarországon 1868/69–1937. Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2014.

[3] BFLIV. 1343. j. III/21: Paulovits Imre.

Károly Halmos: A csődök társadalma [The society of bankruptcies]. In: Társadalomtörténeti tanulmányok Tóth Zoltán emlékére. Horváth Zita – Rada János (eds.). Miskolci Egyetem, Miskolc, 2017. 177–185.