[Rezension zu] Adolf Hanel, fortgeführt von Victor Röll: Die österreichischen Steuergesetze und die Verordnungen über die Ausführung derselben

Robert Meyer: Review of Die österreichischen Steuergesetze (1881)

Robert Meyer’s 1881 review assesses Adolf Hanel’s compilation of Austrian tax laws and implementing ordinances, continued by Victor Röll. Its central concern is documentary accessibility: collecting dispersed provisions serves legal practice while supplying material for scholarly inquiry.

Meyer describes two published volumes. The first covers business, rental-house, and house-class taxes; the second, compiled by Röll using the Finance Ministry’s library and records and published in 1880, addresses land-tax regulation and income tax. Meyer identifies their organizing principle:

Die Herausgeber lassen auf die grundlegenden Gesetze die erläuternden Verordnungen in chronologischer Ordnung folgen.

English translation: The editors follow the fundamental statutes with the explanatory ordinances in chronological order.

This arrangement connects foundational legislation with its subsequent administrative elaboration. Meyer praises the indexes and lists of ordinances, regarding their absence from the short house-class-tax section as a minor inconvenience. His sharper reservation concerns judicial interpretation:

Principielle Entscheidungen des Verwaltungsgerichtshofes haben leider keine Berücksichtigung gefunden.

English translation: Decisions of principle by the Administrative Court have unfortunately found no consideration.

This omission qualifies his favorable assessment: the compilation makes statutes and administrative rules accessible without providing the full interpretive record. Its practical importance nevertheless remains considerable. Provisions predating the Reichsgesetzblatt were largely inaccessible to the public, while officials depended on older collections or original decrees. Nor was restricted access merely a historical problem:

Doch auch für die neuere Zeit ist die Publication zahlreicher, bisher entweder gar nicht oder nur in den rein amtlichen Verordnungsblättern veröffentlichter Erlässe sehr schätzenswerth.

English translation: Yet for the more recent period too, the publication of numerous decrees hitherto either not published at all or published only in the purely official gazettes of ordinances is highly valuable.

Röll’s consultation of official collections thus matters beyond editorial diligence: it brings previously unpublished or narrowly circulated administrative material into wider use. Meyer extends this practical achievement to theoretical study, emphasizing the labor saved and the new research material potentially supplied. The review’s praise rests on the compilation’s capacity to improve both everyday access to tax law and the documentary basis of scholarship.