Michigan Law Review Volume 94 Issue 7 1996 Children of a Lesser God: GDR Lawyers in Post-Socialist Germany Inga Markovits University of Texas Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr Part of the Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, and the Legal Profession Commons Recommended Citation Inga Markovits, Children of a Lesser God: GDR Lawyers in Post-Socialist Germany, 94 MICH. L. REV. 2270 (1996). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol94/iss7/5 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Law Review at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD: GDR LAWYERS IN POST-SOCIALIST GERMANY Inga Markovits* Historical events create their own vocabulary. One of the new words spawned by the collapse of socialism is "lustration": the vetting process by which former socialist officials are examined for their in volvement in perversions of justice under the old regimes and for their suitability to be employed by the new ones. East European countries have thrown themselves into the task with differing amounts of energy. Some countries, like Russia and Bulgaria, consumed with more urgent problems, barely have bothered. Others, like Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia, passed lustration statutes that promptly were attacked for violating constitutional principles that lustration indirectly was in tended to promote. In Poland, legislators found it so difficult to agree on the goals and methods of the cleansing process that seven different drafts of lustration laws failed in parliament.1 No other country tackled the job as thoroughly as Germany, where reunification on October 3, * Friends of Joe Jamail Professor of Law, The University of Texas.