Development of the Latvian Legal History since the Restoration of National Independence in 1990/1991

For decades, the Soviet State was rewriting and falsifying the history of Latvia, including “scientific publications” and textbooks, to make the presentation of history compatible with the Soviet ideology and substantiate Russia’s right “to annex” the territory of Latvia. With the restoration of Latvia’s independence in 1990/1991 and its development as a democratic State governed by the rule of law, a radical change of perspective on historical events, documents and personalities, as well as the legal history of Latvia as science became apparent. The history that had been cultivated by the Soviet State and was founded on the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism had to be urgently revised to stop the impact of the Soviet propaganda, integrated also in history books, on the minds of the Latvian nation.
The circumstances referred to above, which are typical of many countries after overthrowing authoritarianism or totalitarianism and abolishing censorship when the civil society must be created anew and the truth must be clarified, inter alia, the historical truth, i.e., to understand the achievements of the last decades, first of all, basic understanding of the perspectives of the legal history at the times of different political regimes must be gained, i.e., the “heritage” that the contemporary historians of law received, upon commencing their research.
Therefore, in recent decades, the entire of Latvian legal history has been re-examined: both public law and private law. A new field of research that has developed in recent decades is the history of women's rights.
The "restoration" of history, that is, its purification from Soviet propaganda, began with the translation of historical legal sources into Latvian, commenting on them and publishing them. The next stage was the publication of monographs - textbooks, but in recent years biographies of lawyers important to the Latvian state have been published, as well as biographical encyclopaedias, which provide data on the biographies of judges, notaries, attorneys, and law students, etc.
The peculiarity of Latvia is that in 1990/1991 we did not establish a new state, but restored the country occupied by the USSR in 1940 and restored several laws, including the Constitution and the Civil Code. Therefore, most research in national law and civil law focuses on the history of law, and research into the history of law is important in the application of existing legal norms