ABSTRACT
A symposium on the law-based state, pravovoe gosudarstvo, may by its very nature evoke chronological as well as analytical approaches to the subject. Paul Gobel’s comment that “two sets of rights are coming into conflict: the individual rights of citizens and the collective right of nationality groups to self-determination” carries implications for appraising the law-based state and the prospects it holds for Soviet federalism. Louise Shelley among others at the present conference, has spoken to this matter of a legal culture. Eugene Huskey has engaged the subject as much in Soviet as in Western positivist terms—law as zakony, or legal rules, absenting reference to higher authority such as natural law and to the historical school. Social justice with its implications for pravovoe gosudarstvo awaits resolution of the catastrophic environmental and health problems, continuing housing and food shortages, and rising crime—all of which testify to the failure of the grand Soviet scheme to change human nature and create a just society.
