Welcome speech by Dr. Tamás Sulyok, President of Hungary, at the Nizsalovszky Colloquium on Private Law

2024 September 25. 19:09 |Speeches

Submitted by Sándor-palotaon September 25, 2024

"If you don't know where you are going, you will be led where others want you to go."

Dear Madam Professor!
Dear Professors!
Dear Rector!
Dear Citizens of the City of Gyula and of Békés county!
Ladies and Gentlemen!

I warmly welcome all of you with the words of writer András Sütő to the scientific conference held in memory of Endre Nizsalovszky.

András Sütő expressed the above thought in the preface of the Transylvanian Album published during the Millennium celebrations of the Hungarian Conquest. The reference is unmistakable: the only way for the nation to survive is to consciously embrace its identity and maintain it. His statement applies to the entire Hungarian nation. We must know where we are headed to avoid being lost.

The task of the lawyer is to preserve the rule of law. If the pillars, axioms and fundamental rules of our values are abandoned, neglected or contradicted, the consequences are always fatal. This is why our great men and women who confidently show the way forward in historic times are key to our survival.

Born 130 years ago and celebrated today, Endre Nizsalovszky was such a man. A man of strong moral principles, a man who took and bore responsibility for his fellow human beings, a beloved teacher and a legendary jurist.

He was a renowned professor of private law, whom the Hungarian legal profession still looks up to with pride decades later. Endre Nizsalovszky has lived through two world wars, the loss of parts of the country, extreme and anti-human dictatorships, economic crises and attic sweeps, a crushed freedom struggle and socialist oppression. His professorship was taken away from him and he was expelled from the university, but he always remained true to his values. He was guided by principles that dictated that the homeland should be Hungarian, the state should be humane, and the law should be just. He always knew where he was headed, and he could not be diverted from that path.

Endre Nizsalovszky's life journey started from here, from Békés county. The son of the president of the Gyula court was born into a family living their lives according to the values of civil society. Although he felt a calling, his father's example also inspired him to pursue the legal profession. He studied at the University of Debrecen and the Nagyvárad Law Academy, and in the autumn of 1918, he was a legal scholarship holder at the University of Berlin. His contemporaries described him as a meticulous, knowledgeable, and cheerful young man. He was part of the student group that organized entertaining afternoons for injured soldiers returning from the front, aimed at alleviating their traumas.

Endre Nizsalovszky, under the pseudonym Balambér Szélházy, held a humorous evening interwoven with geographical and astronomical discoveries for them. This was the deep capacity for empathy that many of those who knew him spoke about decades later.

Ferenc Mádl, the first President of Hungary to work at Sándor Palace, although much younger than him, became close friends with him. Mádl remembered Nizsalovszky as saying that he "assumed only good things about everyone (...).
Even on his ideological opponents, despite the existential paralysis he had to endure, he cast the magic cloak of humanity (...)."

Interested in public life, Nizsalovszky was thus characterised by goodwill, empathy and solidarity, radiating peacefulness. All this was deeply part of the worldview he had as a young man. Charity was a tradition in their family. The Nizsalovszkys were named on the rolls of new church bells in Gyula and fund-raising campaigns for war orphans.

In this way, he also became a teaching genius who not only imparted his great knowledge, but also listened personally to his students and, in many cases, inspired them. This was the case with President Mádl as well, whom he supervised during his final exams. He even provided housing for him and his young wife-first in the form of a rented apartment, and later by separating a section of his own property in Buda for the young couple.
Endre Nizsalovszky came from the countryside, from the far corners of the land, just like President Mádl, or many others like me.

The law faculties of the Universities of Debrecen, Pécs or Szeged are important places in the education of Hungarian lawyers. For me, it is a personal connection and a matter close to my heart. That is why I would like to reaffirm here, too, that I intend to support the rural community of legal professionals throughout my presidency.

Endre Nizsalovszky initially remained a lawyer practising in the countryside. Here, at the Royal District Court of Gyula, he became a court clerk. He also started teaching here, at the University of Debrecen, his alma mater, 12 years after graduating.

However, his exceptional work ethic, quick wit and reputation led to an increasing number of invitations to the capital.
Among the defining works of his lifetime achievement, we must highlight his codification activities. Among other things, Endre Nizsalovszky was involved in the drafting of the Private Law Bill of 1928. He later played an important role in the drafting of the 1952 Family Law Act and the 1959 Civil Code.

This left us with legislation in force until 2014, and a legacy of legal thinking that is still with us today. His legal education and spirit had an unquestionable influence on the development of the Hungarian legal system.

The university lectern was an inseparable part of his life. From 1929 until his disqualification in 1957, he taught at universities-first in Debrecen, then in Budapest. He initially became a professor of commercial and private law at the Faculty of Economics of the Budapest University of Technology

Then, in 1938, he was transferred to the University of Law in Pest, where five years later he took over the Faculty of Hungarian Civil Law from Károly Szladits, the Dean of the University. On the occasion of his appointment, Dean Károly Szladits held an extraordinary meeting in which he expressed his confidence in him. He acknowledged Nizsalovszky's comprehensive knowledge and work in the field of civil law and his conviction that he would cultivate the law of procedure in the same spirit as his most renowned predecessors in the department, Sándor Plósz, the creator of the modern Hungarian Code of Civil Procedure, and Géza Magyary, the creator of the scientific system of Hungarian procedural law.

Endre Nizsalovszky, the youngest member of the Faculty of Law in Pest, was only 44 years old. Defying all odds, he became an excellent teacher. His sense of responsibility for the next generation of lawyers stemmed from his personality.

When he was banned from teaching, he welcomed his students into his home and continued to pave their way. He also played an important role in ensuring that Ferenc Mádl remained in the safer academic field during a period of political tensions. It was he who later drew Mádl's attention to the legal aspects of Western European integration and its key areas.

The sharpness of Endre Nizsalovszky's mind is perhaps most striking here. The darkness of communism that had long shrouded our country did not hide from him the future of Europe's economic integration. The two lawyers, Nizsalovszky and Mádl, trained in the countryside, teacher and student, had many forward-looking discussions on this subject. And Mádl's research later provided an important reference point for the harmonisation of the vast body of law before Hungary's EU accession.

Endre Nizsalovszky, however, left us a considerable oeuvre not only as a codifier and teacher, but also as a legal scholar. His work was extremely versatile. He was a passionate student of many areas of legal history and legal philosophy, and made detailed international comparative legal studies. He studied a wide range of legal fields, from pledge law through copyright law to organ transplantation law. He wrote books and published in academic journals. He was elected President of the Committee on Political Science and Law of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. However, he also represented the legal profession in other organisations. He was a member of the St. Stephen's Academy and the Hungarian Lawyers' Association. Nizsalovszky's work as an academician contributed many missing building blocks in Hungarian jurisprudence.

On October 22, 1956, the day before the revolution, he spoke openly before his committee. He stood up for his fellow scientists, who had been unjustly imprisoned and marginalised, and called for their compensation. He also expressed pain over the loss of our national symbol, the Hungarian coat of arms.

He declared that Rákosi's coat of arms was "the most unpatriotic national emblem ever." The experienced jurist precisely articulated everything that was unfolding in the soul of the Hungarian nation.

His speech, and the fact that he was appointed Secretary of the Academy during the revolution, was enough for the machinery of the dictatorship to remove him from public life. He lost his titles and his professorship and was banned from the university. Yet, he remained a passionate legal scholar. His home became an intellectual hub for legal studies. Even on his deathbed, he was thinking about preparing the opposition for a doctoral dissertation. This is how he left us in 1976.

What he did for Hungarian jurisprudence has not been forgotten, and we cannot forget. We owe him our gratitude.
Beyond his work in codification, education, and research, it is Endre Nizsalovszky's legal mindset and his unwavering belief in the strengthening of our legal system that make him unforgettable. It is for this reason that we, Hungarian jurists, will remember him even centuries from now.

I thank all lawyers, especially the organisers of this Nizsalovszky Conference, for carefully preserving and upholding his memory and intellectual legacy.

I wish you every success in continuing your work and in making today's meaningful celebration a success!

(Gyula, 25 September 2024)