Articles

Law and Morality from the Legal Point of View: Particular Morality and Cooperative Morality

Prof. UŁ dr hab. Jerzy Leszczyński

University of Łódź

English abstract: This article describes the relation between law and morality when applied to solving legal problems. The relation in question is not understood solely as a conflict between law and morality which implies a need to decide in favor of one or the other. Indeed, moral contents of law make references to morality not only possible but necessary. The limit for those references is established by legal equality principle. Moreover, an internal variety of morality is being analyzed. Some part of it needs to be secured by law what in itself does not harm social and individual identity, that is, public and private morality is distinguished, then minimal and maximal morality – concepts proposed by Michael Walzer. That idea taken from a legal point of view leads to seemingly best funded proposal: particular and cooperative morality.

Keywords: minimal morality, maximal morality, Walzer, public morality, cooperative morality

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 42-53.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.42

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Number of downloads: 85

On Beauty in a Lawyer’s Work

Dr Tomasz Barszcz

John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

English abstract: The article concerns the relationship between beauty and a lawyer’s professional work. I attempt to: 1) discover and describe the activities that are particular of such work as well as are determined by beauty; 2) characterize the way in which beauty determines these activates; and 3) point out ontological reasons of this determination. The reflections do not, however, include all activities which the lawyer’s craft consists in, but are limited to those in the course of which decisions are made. Beauty determines a lawyer’s work via the process of decision-making; and if a decision is conceived as an act of cooperation between intellect and will, then the decision is related to beauty in three ways. First of all, beauty constitutes a sine qua non for finding out the circumstances in which the decision is made. Additionally, beauty suggests to the decision-maker the options as the optimal means to an end. Finally, beauty influences the approval of a decision already made.

Keywords: beauty, law, decision-making, intellect, will

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 17-28.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.17

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Number of downloads: 44

State of Exception in the Philosophy of Law. An Attempt at a Definition

Mgr Weronika Adamska

École des hautes études en sciences sociales

English abstract: The aim of this paper is to propose a definition of the state of exception within the framework of the philosophy of law. The nature of the state of exception is both a legal and a political one. For this reason, it is a subject of inquiry in various disciplines. As a consequence of its hybrid character, state of exception is hard to define, which leads to definitional scepticism. As a criterial definition is impossible to reach, I believe that it should be replaced with a paradigmatic one. Such a definition should take into account the acquis of, among others, philosophy, history or political science, so that it may apply to different methodological approaches. In order to do so, I present the main definitional groups (state of exception as a normative fact, as a constitutional dictatorship, as a political fact, and as a legal void). Next, using the criteria that are common to all those definitions, I propose and analyse three constitutive elements of the state of emergency: a crisis, a suspension of ordinary laws, and a temporary character of this suspension. The definition I propose can help to assess whether a given state is a form of a state of exception. This is of a particular relevance as emergency laws are nowadays widely discussed in the context of terrorist threats.

Keywords: state of exception, emergency laws, constitutional dictatorship, political crisis, philosophy of law, political theory

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 5-16.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.5

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Number of downloads: 40

From Person to Community. The Theory of Participation According to Karol Wojtyła

Dr Wojciech Wojtyła

Kazimierz Pułaski University of Technology and Humanities in Radom

English abstract: The article shows the category of participation as the key, proposed by Karol Wojtyła, to understanding the person-community relationship. The philosopher from Kraków argues that a person fully reveals themselves as a personal being only when they work together with others on the foundation of participation. The capacity for subjective participation, which forms part of the very structure of a person, both determines a personalistic nature of the acts performed by the person, and also enables them to fulfil themselves in relation to others. For Wojtyła, participation is the antithesis of alienation, and its affirmation enables overcoming both the antinomy between the individual and the community, and the one-sided concepts of individualism and collectivism.

Keywords: subject, society, self-agency, self-realization

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 103-117.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.103

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Number of downloads: 26

Removing a Spell by Spell? Some Remarks Regarding Rafał Mańko’s Monograph on the Critical Philosophy of Adjudication

Mgr Mateusz Wojtanowski

University of Wrocław

English abstract: The reviewer claims that Rafał Mańko’s monograph ‘Towards a critical philosophy of adjudication. The political, ethics, legitimacy’ (Łódź, 2018) should be connected with the so called essentialist wing of postmodernism, which deals with the issues of traditional philosophy under the veil of cognitive skepticism. The review attempts to convince a reader that the author’s authoritative metaphysical statements translate into too radical program in the field of adjudication. The reviewer do not deny the necessity to ‘open’ the traditional legal domain to external arguments, however, he claim that the proposal presented in this regard by Rafał Mańko is too far-reaching.

Keywords: adjudication, legal interpretation, political, ideology, CLS, postmodernism

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 118-126.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.118

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Number of downloads: 53

Natural Law Within the Radical Enlightenment

Prof. UAM dr hab. Michał Wendland

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

English abstract: The main difference between classical (both ancient and medieval) and modern concepts of natural law lies in the assumption of its supernatural (divine) foundation. Early modern philosophical concepts tend to undermine and gradually to deny God or some other metaphysical entity as the source of natural law. Some contemporary scholars (e.g. Habermas, Bobbio) define this process as transition (modernization, rationalization, Positivisierung) of traditional natural law towards the idea of natural rights and human rights.

We can distinguish at least three main schools of natural law during the 17th and 18th centuries, each one more radical than the others: de Groot dares to consider the natural law “as if there were no God”. The philosophers of early Enlightenment (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire) were perhaps more daring, nevertheless they were all deists and the “Supreme Being” still validates natural law in their writings.

The article aims to examine the most radical view on natural law, i.e. partly forgotten and underestimated ideas of French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet. For they were all thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (J. Israel), all of them were materialists and atheists, and they perceived the nature and natural law as completely separated from God or other supernatural being. Unlike their older colleagues, these radical philosophers demanded equality (for women and ethnical minorities as well), emancipation, and social justice for all classes.

This papers describes the idea of natural law within the radical Enlightenment movement, and investigates some political consequences of this interpretation during the French Revolution. While strongly materialistic, progressive, and atheist, the ideas of Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet were also perceived as politically dangerous. All revolutionary attempts to put these ideas into political and social practice have failed. Finally, these ideas were refuted, but they returned during the 19th- and 20th-century debates on human rights.

Keywords: natural law, radical Enlightenment, modernity, materialism, ethical naturalism

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 91-102.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.91

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Number of downloads: 27

In the Margins of the Concept of the Language of Legal Norms

Prof. dr hab. Andrzej Malinowski

University of Warsaw

English abstract: The article presents an attempt at an alternative approach to the scholarly interpretation model, in which statements expressed in the language of norms have been replaced by statements in the language of lawyers. In the proposed approach, the result of the interpretation of a legal text is a set of sentences of the lawyers’ language stating that a specific general legal norm applies at the moment of interpretation due to the validity of the relevant fragment of the legal text. The whole (complete) set of statements in the lawyers’ language whereby legal norms are held to be valid is treated by lawyers as a description of the legal system. It is stated that, considering the law as a system, neither case law nor scholarship in practice refers to the language of norms, but to the results of interpretations described in the lawyers’ language. However, the paradigm of scholarly interpretation using the concept of the language of norms has its undoubted cognitive value and is useful for didactic purposes.

Keywords: scholarly interpretation, legal system, legal language, lawyers’ language, language of norms

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 54-64.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.54

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Number of downloads: 36

References to Schools of Legal Thought in the Justifications of Judgments of Polish Courts

Prof. UR dr hab. Grzegorz Maroń

University of Rzeszów

English abstract: The article presents the results of a quantitative and qualitative study of the Polish case law in terms of the presence of direct references to schools of legal thought in the written justifications of judgments. Although these types of references are very rare, their intensification can be observed in the last decade. In justifications of court decisions, references were made to just a few strands of jurisprudence. Most references relate to jusnaturalism and legal positivism. Courts characterize schools of legal thought in a simplified and exaggerated manner, and sometimes also incorrectly. The judicature usually disregards the authors’ versions of particular strands of jurisprudence, reaching for the claims derived from these strands in their ‘average’ form. The paper posits that legal philosophy is potentially useful for courts, especially in hard cases. It may help judges to perform the explanatory and persuasive functions of justifications of judgments. The condition for this is that references to the tenets of specific schools of legal thought should not be superficial, shallow or slogan-like. Otherwise, they play only an ornamental role, not an argumentative one.

Keywords: schools of legal thought, justifications of judgments, Polish courts, judicial argumentation

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 65-79.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.65

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Number of downloads: 39

Linguistic Corpora as a Tool of Statutory Interpretation: American Theory and Practice

Prof. dr hab. Zygmunt Tobor, dr Mateusz Zeifert

University of Silesia in Katowice

English abstract: In American adjudicating practice and theory of statutory interpretation, great attention is paid to the notion of ordinary meaning of legal text. In order to determine the ordinary meaning, judges usually refer to their own linguistic intuition or dictionaries – both these methods give rise to a number of reservations that have been expressed in legal literature for years. In the last few years, courts have also started using linguistic corpora for this purpose. Linguistic corpora are electronic collections of authentic texts in a given language which can be analyzed using IT tools (e.g. searches, frequency lists, concordances, collocations). Corpus research requires considerable linguistic knowledge and technical skills, and in return it offers statistical data that can reveal a lot about the semantic layer of language. The use of corpora by judges – first in state courts, later also in the federal Supreme Court – sparked lively academic discussion. In Polish literature, this issue has not been discussed so far, which is why the article is essentially of a reporting nature. First, an outline of corpus linguistics is presented. Then the history of the use of linguistic corpora by US courts is reconstructed. Finally, the legal discussion about corpora in the US is presented, with particular emphasis on voices approving their use and on critical voices.

Keywords: statutory interpretation, corpus linguistics, linguistic corpora, US case law

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 80-90.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.80

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Number of downloads: 35

Legal Status of Animals in the Context of Their Biological Categorization

Mgr Michał Janowski

University of Łódź

English abstract: Polish legal regulations protecting animals are inconsistent. The Act of 21 August 1997 on Animal Protection and the Act of 15 January 2015 on the Protection of Animals Used for Scientific or Educational Purposes accord protection to different categories of animals. These regulations should be harmonized due to the underlying values. In addition, the current model of animal protection in Poland requires consideration. Polish regulations protecting animals have not been preceded by a reflection on the special features of some groups of animals. In particular, Polish law does not take account of the fact that some animals have higher cognitive functions, including non-linguistic ability to recognize themselves – awareness of self. The article characterizes the phenomenon of animal self-awareness, which should be relevant in discussions on the legal status of some animals.

Keywords: legal status of animals, awareness of self, animal protection

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 29-41.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.29

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Number of downloads: 36