The extraordinary events now unfolding in Eastern Europe offer a unique opportunity to investigate how the tensions between socialism and utopian ideology on the one hand and the rule of law and protection of individual rights on the other hand will be resolved in the context of current legal reforms in East and West Germany. With German reunification, the East German legal institutions, lawyers, and citizens will have to adjust to a legal system fundamentally different from the one they have known for the last forty years. This small award will provide travel and subsistence support for the investigator to gather data in East and West Germany in order to examine what influence socialist concepts and thought patterns exert over the East German legal reform process. The data collection will focus on two specific legal contexts: the judicial review of administrative decisionmaking and the allocation of visitation rights to non-custodial parents upon divorce. Data will be collected from court observations, court records, interviews, and analysis of the literature. This support will allow the investigator to take advantage of history in the making in the unification of East and West Germany. The results of this effort will provide valuable information for further analyses of East German legal reform efforts and will be informative in other countries which are struggling with the contradiction between the desire for social cohesion and the respect for individual rights and autonomy.
