People in Spite of History

by Tibor Várady (Editor), Richard Buxbaum (Foreword), János Boris (Translator)

Three generations of a family of lawyers have run a firm founded in 1893 in the small city of Becskerek (today in Serbian Zrenjanin), first part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg monarchy, then Hungary, then Yugoslavia, then for a while under German occupation, then again part of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia. In the Banat district of the province of Vojvodina, the multiplicity of languages and religions and changes of place-names was a matter of course. What is practically unprecedented, all files, folders and documents of the law office have survived. They concern marriages, divorces, births and testaments, as well as expulsions, emigrations, incarcerations and releases of these largely rural and small-town dwellers. Mundane cases reflect times through war, peace, revolution and counter-revolution, through serfdom and freedom, through comfort and poverty. The files also show everyday lives shaped in spite of history. Tibor Várady transforms them into affecting and vivid vignettes, selecting and commenting without sentimentality but with empathy. The law office of the three generations of the Várady family demonstrates that the legal profession permits and in difficult times even requires its members to defend the ordinary men and women against the powers of state and society.

341 pages, Hardcover

Published January 20, 2021

About the author

also: Tibor Varadi

Tibor Varadi, umirovljeni profesor međunarodnog prava, doskora predavač na američkim univerzitetima, bivši ministar, predstavnik Srbije u međunarodnim sporovima, član SANU; u mladosti je pisao beletristiku i uređivao književne časopise u Novom Sadu. Poslednjih godina ponovo se vratio pisanju.
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Várady Tibor is a University Professor at the Central European University in Budapest, and a Professor Emeritus at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. He received his law degree at the Belgrade University School of Law, and holds an S.J.D. at Harvard Law School. He has more than 250 publications written in five languages with some of his works being translated into several other languages. He published extensively in Private International Law and International Commercial Arbitration. His more recent publications devoted to arbitration include the casebook International Commercial Arbitration – A Transnational Approach (co-authors J. Barcelo, and A. von Mehren, West Publ. Fifth Edition 2012), the monograph Language and Translation in International Commercial Arbitration, (T.M.C. Asser Press, 2006), and the monograph The Elusive Pro-Arbitration Priority in Contemporary Scrutiny of Arbitral Awards Collected Courses of the Xiamen Academy of International Law, Vol. 2 M. Nijhoff Publ. 2009, 341-474). He acted as arbitrator in about 200 cases. He had also acted as agent, counsel and advocate in 10 cases before the International Court of Justice. A considerable number of his publications have been devoted to minority rights. At the Central European University, he also taught a course entitled Law and Ethnicity.