The present volume contains a series of articles that make up the aftermatch of the Polish-Hungarian Conference on legal history that was held in Cracow, 23–24 September 2007. The Conference was devoted to the constitutional developments in the Habsburg monarchy in the last decades before its fall. In the reports that were delivered on this occasion a strong emphasis was laid on the constitutional liberalism characteristic of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and consequently – of the elements of Rechtsstaat detectable in this organism.

The readers of the present volume may find a considerable range of problems discussed in the respective papers. Thus the article by István Kajtár depicts the silhouette of Andor Csizmadia, an outstanding legal historian whose research was, to a large extent, devoted to the constitutional evolution of the Habsburg empire in the era of dualism that followed 1867. The papers by Krisztina Korsósné and Andrzej Dziadzio focus, in their turn, on the description of the symptoms of Rechtsstaat in the judiciary both in the Hungarian and the Austrian parts of the monarchy. An interesting image of relationships between State and Church in the Hungarian part of the dualistic state is presented in the article written by Eszter Herger. Zsuzsanna Peres, in her turn, explores in her paper the succession law of the epoch, and in that context analyses the instrument of fideicomissum and its contribution to the survival of Hungarian national heritage.