For a significant part of the twentieth century, the countries and nations of Eastern Europe were considered as belonging to the “socialist family of laws”. There is no great need to study this particular phase or concept in any detail for the simple reason that in recent years it has become clear that Marx and Trotsky were wrong. It is not capitalism that will be consigned to the dust-bin of history, it is Communism that is being consigned to the trash heap in 1991.

It should now be evident that a lot of wool has been pulled over a lot of eyes on the subject of “socialist law”. For years, scholars and practitioners—believed in the existence of an efficient or at least a workable and functioning collection of legal systems in Eastern Europe. These were all assumed to be based, in some respectable fashion or other, on the precepts of Marx and Engels, applying the Hegelian dialectic to arrive at the desired legal norms of the new society and implementing legislation to achieve this goal. Everyone then understood the Communists view of law as a political instrument which would shift societies to a final workers’ paradise.

Common Law systems have always practiced a fairly consistent comparative legal research and scholarship. Initially through the mere exportation of rules and principles from England this was a somewhat centripetal comparative law but it has passed through various modes of radial, circumferential, centrifugal and ultimately polycentric comparisons and cross-fertilizations. Nevertheless, this exercise in comparative law, also in Australia, has remained largely within the boundaries of the Common Law world. It is no longer possible for legal research to be conducted wholly within the boundaries of a single legal system, even that of the enlarged Common Law. Legal researchers need to look beyond the borders of their own jurisdictions. Hardly any legal system today is capable of operating without international interactions requiring a knowledge of foreign legal systems, and many legal problems, or socio-economic problems which law must help to solve, may find useful models elsewhere. In Australia there are needs for reform in fields such as intellectual property, banking or consumer law, and for providing qualified advice including predictions of developments in foreign legal systems to ensure that foreign commerce and trade is fully informed of potential benefits and disadvantages to be found under foreign law. Australia must also be able to take its proper place in fields such as international environmental protection, and to take advantage of potentially beneficial developments in dispute resolution techniques. All of these situations are ones in which, by looking outside their national and even Common Law framework, Australian legal researchers will be better placed to provide concrete benefits to Australian society.