ABSTRACT
Under the Marxian concept that in the ultimate Communist society the state would wither away, a principle strongly reaffirmed under Nikita Khrushchev at the 21st and 22nd Party Congresses in the USSR, lay participation in the adjudicatory process is crucial. Lenin had envisioned comrades’ courts as a mechanism by which social pressures might reduce antisocial behaviour.1 Staffed by lay persons of the immediate community, they were to apply and inculcate ‘socialist legality’. In the words of one scholar, ‘they are courts of the future in the sense that they now operate as an understudy for the regular courts and are intended to replace the regular courts once the society attains full communism’.2 The German Democratic Republic, in setting up social courts in 1953, drew on the theory and practice of the USSR,3 but during the following three decades the nature of social courts in the GDR has diverged significantly from the Russian model.
