Pashukanis, Yevgeni Bronislavich

(1891–c.1937)

   A Russian legal theorist and one of the most significant contributors to Marxist theory of law, Pashukanis served as people’s commissar for justice in 1936, before a change in Soviet legal theory toward “socialist legality” and away from Pashukanis’ notion of the “withering away of law” led to his disappearance and presumed murder at the hands of Josef Stalin’s henchmen. In his most notable work, Law and Marxism (1924), he argued that law is a historical form of regulation that occurs in societies based on commodity exchange, and is inappropriate for communism. He therefore argued for the “dejuridification” of the Soviet Union as part of the “withering away of law,” with laws to be replaced by “technical regulation.”