To the legal world, Tibor Várady is a scholar, educator, and practitioner. International lawyers know him as the author of treatises in international private law, as an arbitrator in commercial disputes, and as frequent counsel in the International Court of Justice. Legal academics know him for his guidance of the Legal Studies Department of the Central European University and as a professor at Emory University School of Law. In government circles in Europe, he is known for a brief stint as Minister of Justice of what remained of Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Várady began legal work under his father and grandfather in a law practice out of the family home in a town in the Serbian sector of a region called Banat, which stretches across Hungary, Serbia, and Romania. People in Spite of History is based on court dossiers and other file material surviving from the law practice, which was founded in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Cases during the German occupation, 1941–44, were exceedingly difficult for the Váradys. When the occupation began, a woman sued her husband's employer after the husband died while driving a company car. To continue with the suit, the court required her to prove that neither she nor her two young children were Jewish or Roma. In another case, a German wife sought alimony from a Jewish husband who had been sent to a concentration camp. Since his assets had been confiscated by the Nazi authorities, her claim for alimony was more against them than against the husband. They entered the case to defend against the alimony claim, in order to rationalize their own hold on the husband's assets.

The Várady lawyers tried, usually without success, to help Roma or Jews whose property was being confiscated. They could not question confiscation decrees but argued around them. When they questioned the taking of a Jewish-owned leather factory, a denial came back in writing, explaining that the client was a “Volljüdin” and thus fell under decrees on property of “Juden und Zigeuner.” The letter closed with “Heil Hitler” (34). After the occupation ended, the town's new administration, under the Tito-led partisans who had fought the occupation, refused to return the factory because the owner had “collaborated” by selling leather to the Nazi authorities, and because the factory fell under socialist-oriented nationalization decrees.

When German troops came into control of the town in 1941, divorces were sought against Jewish spouses. There was no intent of ending the marital relationship, but family property was at risk of confiscation. In the weeks before the German army evacuated the town in 1944, the reverse happened. Women married to German men filed for divorce. They did not necessarily plan to finalize a divorce. They thought that simply filing might put them in better stead with the partisans. During that same period, with the occupation ending, a Hungarian woman sued her German landlord for slander. A notion in the file reads: “The accused German has fled. The case has been discontinued” (15). Germans who had collaborated with the occupation forces knew that they would not be popular under the partisans.

While the case files only hint what the Várady lawyers thought about the Nazi period in the town, one gains insight from an episode that the author recounts. As a 3-year-old during the occupation, he discovered a stranger sleeping at night in the attic of their house, which doubled as the law office. The man, who seemed not to leave the attic during the day, told interesting tales about having hunted lions in the town. When the young Várady asked about the stranger, he found himself forbidden to go out of the house to play. His father feared that he might inadvertently reveal the presence of the Jewish lion hunter.

Várady earlier published accounts of some of these case files, first in Hungarian in 2013, then in Serbian in 2015, and then in German in 2016. Anglophones are fortunate now to have access. For a social historian, interest lies in what the cases reveal about the life of a multi-ethnic community living through difficult times. A lawyer reading the book will wonder how s/he would have dealt with the situations that confronted the Várady law firm. An introduction by Professor Richard Buxbaum, former editor of the American Journal of Comparative Law, notes the book's broader importance. It could well serve as a model for writers on law and social history, even those who do not have elders who practiced law through two world wars and one social revolution.