University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Serbian Association of Legal and Social Philosophy organized a conference entitled “Citizens, Legal Systems and Societies: Law and Society in Central and South Eastern Europe”. The conference was held on 21 November 2014 at the Faculty of Law in Belgrade and brought together social scientists and legal scholars from Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia.

The conference was opened with the speech by Prof. Dr. Slobodan Marković, and Prof. Dr. Miodrag Jovanović, president of the Serbian Association for Legal and Social Philosophy.

The first session dealt with the relationship of society and the law. Speakers in this sections were Marek Mikuš (“Legal Formalization through Informal Sociality? An Anthropological Perspective on the Reforms of Civil Society Legislation in Serbia”) and Danilo Vuković (“Social Accountability and the Rule of Law”).

The second session was devoted to citizens’ views on laws and normative systems. Speakers in this sections were Jan Bazili Klakla (“The attitudes towards customary law within the Romani community in Central Europe”) and Đerđi Gajdušek and Balaš Fekete (“What Hungarian people know about the laws and today half a century ago?”).

The legitimacy of the legal and social system was the topic of the third session. Speakers of this sections were Žolt Boda and Đerđo Medve-Balint (“Procedural fairness and legitimacy of the laws in Hungary”) and Tilen Štajnpihler (“Judicial precedents as a factor in civil law adjudication: A sociological perspective”).

The last session was devoted to the issue of nationality in the context of contemporary Europe. Speakers were Tina Oršolić Dalesio (“EU citizens in the Time of Crisis: How fundamental is the European Union citizenship status?”) and Bojan Vranić (“Does citizenship entail “metaphysical” laws?”).

The next conference dedicated to issues of sociology and theory of law will be held in Budapest in 2015. Papers presented at the Belgrade conference will be published in a special issue of the journal Sociology.