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| Laszlo Solyom, a Transitional President of Hungary, Dies at 81 | Laszlo Solyom, a Transitional President of Hungary, Dies at 81 |
| (about 5 hours later) | |
| Laszlo Solyom, a legal scholar who helped guide Hungary in its transition to a free-market democracy after the fall of Communism in 1989, presiding over his country’s Constitutional Court and then serving as its president from 2005 to 2010, died on Oct. 8 in Budapest. He was 81. | Laszlo Solyom, a legal scholar who helped guide Hungary in its transition to a free-market democracy after the fall of Communism in 1989, presiding over his country’s Constitutional Court and then serving as its president from 2005 to 2010, died on Oct. 8 in Budapest. He was 81. |
| Marton Hovanyi, a senior lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University, where Mr. Solyom once taught law, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, saying only that it came after a long illness. | Marton Hovanyi, a senior lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University, where Mr. Solyom once taught law, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, saying only that it came after a long illness. |
| Mr. Solyom, a law professor in Budapest, was part of a generation of Central European intellectuals who, beginning in the 1980s, laid the groundwork for the transition away from Communism through the formation of nongovernmental organizations that expanded the scope of civic society. | Mr. Solyom, a law professor in Budapest, was part of a generation of Central European intellectuals who, beginning in the 1980s, laid the groundwork for the transition away from Communism through the formation of nongovernmental organizations that expanded the scope of civic society. |
| He was a leading figure in the Danube Circle, an environmental coalition that opposed dams and other projects along his country’s main waterway — a form of protest masked as ecological activism. | He was a leading figure in the Danube Circle, an environmental coalition that opposed dams and other projects along his country’s main waterway — a form of protest masked as ecological activism. |
| He was a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, which emerged after 1989 as the country’s main center-right party. And he took part in the Opposition Round Table Talks, a series of meetings to plan the political and legal frameworks for post-Communist Hungary. | |
| By then he had developed a reputation for his astute scholarship on privacy rights, knowledge that made him an obvious choice to be one of the founding justices on Hungary’s Constitutional Court, the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court. He joined it in 1989 and a year later became chief justice. |