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"I can't imagine education without values, all the more can I imagine one without politics," said Professor István Varga to our paper. We talked to the head of the Private Law Workshop of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium about, among other things, his teaching creed and the ideal functioning of the rule of law.
The fact that he took over the leadership of the Private Law Centre of Mathias Corvinus Collegium gave a good opportunity to assess these issues. What can we expect regarding the future character of the Centre?
This question is answered in the title of my course: “Comparative Approach in the Fields of Private Law Formulation and Enforcement”. This foresees that the ideal of the MCC Private Law Centre is a group of elite legal intellectuals open to the world, both physically and mentally.
My goal here, as well as at the Faculty of Law of Eötvös Loránd University, is to share as deeply as possible with my students what I once accumulated as a student and then as a researcher and practicing lawyer at the German, French, American and Hungarian stages of my professional life.
Here we nurture talent, so I will place particular emphasis on involving international professionals in education, whose contribution can strengthen our students’ critical, questioning thinking skills.
In order to achieve the same goal, I asked my former highly talented student, Ákos Mernyei, to help me at the Centre with his professional knowledge and practical, international professional experience as a teaching partner. And since we talk of character: the development of a comparative approach also presupposes a kind of life form which can be grasped in the attraction to both senses of divergence previously mentioned and to the new that can be learned in the process.
Based on the thoughts of Oswald Spengler, recognizing and understanding the differences between the “own” and the “other” can enable the elite of the future social scientist and in a narrower sense the jurist to enrich the “own” or if you will: the domestic legal life, quality legislation and application of the law. When, about 25 years ago, I was going into raptures over becoming a professor at a South German university to friend of mine, a German monk, he said, "but you have to go back to your homeland to help there."
The full interview is available here.
Source of the cover photo: mandiner.hu, Márton Ficsor
