ABSTRACT
In the Soviet era, when the official name of the University of Tartu was ‘Tartu State University’, its Law Faculty was the only faculty of law in Estonia. This chapter looks at the structural elements that allowed legal history to shake the general aims and ideology of the Soviet system. It characterises the most important academics who taught legal history at Tartu State University. The chapter considers the ways and means of covert resistance employed by academics that enabled them to diverge from official party-controlled views. The first ever Estonian with a doctorate in legal history was Leo Leesment. His master’s dissertation, defended in 1926, concerned Old Livonian legal history, and he continued to work in the same area in his doctoral dissertation on medieval criminal law, defended in 1930. It was not only students who failed to pick up such hints, but also younger academics who did not have personal memories of the interwar-era Republic of Estonia.
