- Several science magazines for legal research in Bulgaria have long fallen behind the schedule for their publication- between six months and one year. For example today you would receive the issue that was due for mid 2009. The reason is the chronic shortage of authors i.e. of excited jurists who want to share their professional anguish with the public. The reason for this growing indifference to legal science is the depressive ignoring of its recommendations by legislation and court practice. This kills the embryo of scientific analysis and its publication because of the absurdity of such a sacrifice effort and its miserable remuneration. The final supreme legislative and court decisions are shaped by the suggestions of small anonymous advisory “groups of impudents” attached to a respective legislative bill or to a court precedent draft who, after laying their mentally damaged eggs, disappear in the darkness of irresponsibility. Their sharp social elbows are hidden in the soft velveteen glance, radiating admiration towards to the Mr.- or Madame Minister. These are not the underpaid university lectureres writing, signing and publishing openly their convictions in the legal magazines.
- But the question has another aspect. Practicing law graduates, lawyers and magistrates who want to refer to the legal conclusions from those magazines find it extremely difficult to come across the publication they need. The urgent presentation of a written submission or the issuing of a court decision rule simply out the hours and days to go through the yearly files of those magazines. Neither in the lawyer’s nor in the judge’s cabinet there is enough space for keeping those magazines at least from the five recent years. Only from the last year may be- and the rest is trashed. Like water in the sand.
- For quite some time we have suggested and insisted before the publishers of the best Bulgarian legal magazines that their contents should be also loaded on discs or with an encoded access on Internet. This would make possible the (multi) yearly course of a magazine to be subjeted to a computer search program so that the user finds immediately the publication relevant for a pending case – as a title or as a text reference. Thus the efforts invested in the publication would find their practical consumption and sense.
- It has been objected that such an electronic access to the magazines’ contents would undermine its hard paper sale. So what?- you can sell the electronic copy on the same or higher price. One could copy illegally but this would not be the business of judges and law firms subscribed to the electronic version. And there is reliable protection against unauthorised copying. The simple compromise solution is to put on the disc only the magazine’s content of the previous year and only the current year should be on hard paper to ensure sale in its present form. And this scheme should be in the general copyright conditions for publication.
- The only happy exception known to us is the magazine “Bar Review” whose issues are freely accessible on the site of the Supreme Bar Council so that a quick search reference and print out could be made to present it to whom it may concern.
- Just a month ago the Bulgarian candidate for EU commissioner Mrs. Rumina Jeleva resigned also due to suspicions for her participation in commercial companies and the timely withdawal from their management. Her team failed to defend her legally in those hottest days. But the convincing defense position was in two articles in Bulgarian legal magazines from recent years. Nobody recalled them. Would it be the same if her team had a quick electronic access to all those publications?
February 2010
Valentin Braykov