A tudomány pártos szabadságától a szabadságot pártoló tudományig

On the centenary of the birth of István Kovács, we will briefly review the political and public law environment in which the young lawyer's academic and teaching career began after 1945, and the extent to which this environment was gradually democratised at the end of his career. To do this, we shall describe the role of the short-lived Scientific State Council and the Party College, the legal status of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the severe limitations on its internal regulatory autonomy, and the ideological constraints of the related higher education and Sovietised jurisprudence. The decades spent in the creation of the network of academic institutes, the Institute of Law and the Szeged University ended with the hope that law in Hungary, too, could become less an ideological-power issue and more a professionalscientific one, which was manifested in the writing of textbooks and in proposals to help the development of legislative and academic freedom. An assessment of his work on constitutional law also involves a characterisation of his times, to which this paper is intended to make a modest contribution