Remarks on Lay Judges in Polish Criminal Process Passing Moral Judgements

Keywords: moral competence, professional judges, lay judges, moral reasoning

English abstract: The article addresses the issue of the participation of lay judges in passing moral judgements during the stage of adjudication. It attempts to realize the postulate of external integration of jurisprudence by combining the achievements of legal studies and moral philosophy as well as public philosophy in research work.

The basic theses of the article are as follows: lay judges-citizens have the moral competence to pass moral judgements during the process of adjudication. There is no reason to consider a professional judge better prepared to pass moral judgements than a lay one. A broadening of the court panels to include citizens can be seen as a remedy for issues such as: conformism, ignorance, intellectual errors in the judicial discourse. Furthermore, citizens are capable of supplementing the judicial process of application of law with Aristotelian category of reasonableness. The article presents also the threats resulting from lay judges’ participation in the process of passing morel assessments in the criminal process.

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