In 2021, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (unconstitutionally composed) dropped a judicial bomb on the primacy of the EU law, a judicial dialogue with the Court of Justice, and a mechanism for providing the rule of law conditions by the Member States. The Tribunal, for the first time in history, recognised Articles 1(1), 2, 4(3) and 19(1) TEU unconstitutional. The text critically unpacks the Tribunal’s reasoning. It provides doctrinal explanations and a broader interpretation of the judgement in the context of the Tribunal’s past case law and the existing Polish debate about the judgment. One of the main arguments is that the current Tribunal is intellec-tually dishonest and abusive regarding constitutional law. It took advantage of recycling the previous constitutional case law, which was not so enthusiastic about the primacy of the EU law. The Tribunal follows strategies of illiberals or abusive constitutional actors, who conceal their real intentions and actions behind the veil of noble values and respected aims.

This article argues that regulatory sandboxes have become a necessary legislative tool to foster new business models. In the past, some new ideas failed because of the lack of such a legislative tool, shown by the Uber case. AI may play a dual role as an object of regulation and a tool of supervision, including RIA, which poses an additional threat to society at a time when it is becoming apparent that it may escape human control. This requires a reversal of the goals of a sandbox where providing security becomes more important than nurturing novelty. While the EU Commission and scholars encourage trust in AI, distrust should be the guiding principle. In addition, the rule of law may be compromised due to the use of regu-latory sandboxes as a back door for the legislative and administrative authorities to go around the established principles.

One of the fundamental dilemmas in judicial application of the law is to respect the principle of the rule of law and not only the principle of legalism. The principle of legalism as enshrined in Article 7 of the Constitution insufficiently protects the constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms of the individual, and therefore judicial activism is required, i.e. a correction of the established law in the process of interpretation and application of the law in order to give the law such content that is consistent with the constitutionally defined values underlying the axiology of the Polish Constitution. The correction of the legislated law involves going beyond the content of the principle of legalism and referring to such values as – equity, justice, goodness, human rights and freedoms.
The judge, due to the fact that under the Constitution he is first and foremost subject to its provisions, and secondarily to the laws, may – if he is able to justify it – reject the content of the statutory provisions and base his decision exclusively on the provisions of the Constitution. This is justified when the Constitution protects individual rights and freedoms to a greater extent than the law. A judge may not invoke the rule dura lex sed lex in the process of interpretation, as it destroys the standards of legal culture. The correction of statute law in the process of its inter-pretation relates to judicial independence and responsibility for the issued decision.

The article is focused on financing of Polish support to displaced persons arriving to Poland from Ukraine after 24 February 2022, so after the Russian invasion on Ukraine. Poland has introduced a new statute and has amended general rules applicable in mass influx situations. That area of law is regulated also by Directive 2001/55/EC which establishes a minimum standard of displaced persons’ rights, leaving their financing primarily to national budgets. The Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2022/382 is the first law which has activated the Directive. Under the amended Polish law, support to persons from Ukraine is subject to the avail-ability of national financial resources, which contradicts the principles of public finance law because Polish law does not establish predictable sources of financing, and spendings are not controlled by the Polish Parliament.

The issue of the rule of law as a criterion for the action of public administration bodies has not yet been the subject of wider doctrinal reflection. The reason for this state of affairs is probably the rather sparing reference by public administration bodies to the rule of law as a basis for their decisions. Meanwhile, the obligation imposed on the authorities in Article 7 of the Code of Administrative Procedure should be treated as one of their fundamental duties in ongoing administrative proceedings. The present study focuses on signalling only some of the problems related to the notion of the rule of law on the grounds of general administrative procedure, indicating the ambiguity of this phrase and the related various understandings of it. The conclusions should be regarded as an invitation to discuss this undoubtedly complex issue.

This paper discusses judicial duty of improving the law on epistemic grounds and claims in that regarding this obligation, it is possible to give a place to free speech from an epistemic point of view. As a requirement of having epistemic agency, judges like other human beings have epistemological responsibility. Different from the others’ responsibility, judges’ responsibility is connected to their duty of improving the law, which is required by their job as well as the idea of the rule of law and judicial professional principles. Judges should improve the law’s capacity to guide the conduct of its citizens, who are obligated to obey the law. Improving the law also improves the delivery of justice. The ways of legal interpretation and justification are important to improve it. While applying the law, judges can find the law unclear or they may encounter some norm conflicts. In these cases, they
should resolve them to keep the law ‘legally in good shape’, which should meet epistemological requirements. When fulfilling this obligation, judicial free speech on epistemic grounds should not be limited.

The aim of the article is to characterise selected tax principles included in the Polish financial law literature. Legal academics and commentators widely emphasise that these principles are extremely crucial for the tax system. They express the postulates to which a properly designed tax, as well as a rational tax system, should correspond. In view of the fact that the academic discourse has been emphasising for many years that tax law is of low quality and thus difficult and costly to apply, as well as the low assessment of tax regulations enacted as part of the so-called Polish Deal, it was considered appropriate to remind the significance of the most important of these models, the content of which was expressed as tax principles.

Many of the principles of taxation that were developed in the first half of the 20th century, such as the arm’s length principle and the definition of the term “permanent establishment” (PE) in determining the tax position of international business operations, when applied to the business models of the 21st century, often result in the under-taxation of businesses that are otherwise fully compliant with the laws as presently written and implemented. Compounding the problem is the fact that these rules and principles of taxation are broadly recognized and are enshrined in a wide network of tax treaties. This makes the task of modifying or updating these rules and principals extremely difficult. Using legal-dogmatic and legal-theoretical methods, the author will show that present attempts to tax e-commerce transactions unilaterally are not effective and that, under present conditions, even organizations such as the EU are unable to address the problem at hand. The OECD project, commissioned by the G-20, which seeks to create a set of international e-commerce taxation rules, faces some very serious difficulties – largely because a well-established “set in stone” complement of internationally accepted laws, rules, and regulations is serving to block the development of new, more appropriate rules. This phenomenon has become known as the lock-in effect or legal impossibilism. In order to effectively address this phenomenon, lawmakers on a global basis must understand the mechanisms that are blocking the effective evolution of business taxation.

Mediation in the administrative procedure is a new institution that provides a chance for an improved perception of public administration, yet it also gives rise to a range of doubts. The latter spring chiefly, though not solely, from the nature of administrative control. The principles of the rule of law, objective law, and voluntary mediation, which may be taken an improper advantage of, contrary to the legislator’s intentions, are also identified as barriers.
Analysis of the issue implies that administrative proceedings leave room for mediation. Whether it will fulfil expectations, however, largely depends on the attitudes of parties and administrative authorities, or their employees, to be precise, for whom mediation is undoubtedly both a processual and mental challenge.
The introduction of mediation to the Code of Administrative Procedure is to be applauded, mainly from the perspective of inducing citizens’ trust in public authorities. Mediation may also prove an effective instrument of eliminating conflicts in administration and thus contribute to reducing the caseload to be heard by administrative courts.
It is important, though, for this opportunity to be taken proper advantage of and for the transformation of administration from controlling to mediating and more friendly to subjects administered to continue. This is a trend that deserves to be followed not only in Polish but also other legislations.

These standards were introduced at four international organizations and supranational associations: 1) the European Union; 2) the Council of Europe; 3) the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; 4) the Commonwealth of Independent States. The article states that the key reason for the introduction of standards for the regulation of lobbying at the international level was considerable corruption in the adoption of legal acts. It is concluded that latent and unregulated lobbying can seriously undermine public confidence in the institution of government, especially in the countries of the so-called “new democracy”. International regulation of lobbying takes the form of resolutions, procedural rules, guidelines, recommendations and model legislation. Notably, the first steps towards international regulation of lobbying were taken by the institutions of the European Union. Today EU standards for the regulation of lobbying is based on a series of articles set out in the EU-founding treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. EU standards for the regulation of lobbying influence not only the EU Member States, but it also extends to EU Partner Countries. Significant steps in the implementation of international standards for the regulation of lobbying are being constantly carried out by the Council of Europe. The establishment of CE standards for the regulation of lobbying is reflected in the activity of statutory bodies of the Council of Europe and its semi-autonomous bodies. In recent years a lot of work on the strengthening of international standards for lobbying regulation has been done by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. To help address the concerns with transparency and integrity in lobbying, the OECD Member Countries adopted in 2010 a Recommendation on Principles for Transparency and Integrity in Lobbying as guidance to decision-makers on how to promote good governance in lobbying. Another international organization, which began to regulate actively the practice of lobbying is the Commonwealth of Independent States. In order to intensify the work concerning legislative regulation of lobbying in the member countries of the CIS, at the XXII Plenary Session of the Interparliamentary Assembly of the CIS member states the Resolution No. 22-16 of November 15, 2003 was adopted, which approved a model law “On regulation of lobbying activity in state authorities”.

The aim of the publication is to establish the function of the legal regulation of the principle of resolving legal doubts in favour of the citizen (in dubio pro libertate), introduced by the amendment of 2017 to the Code of Administrative Procedure. The purpose of the article is also to compare the state of the regulation in force at the time of its entry into force with the legal state created after the introduction of the amendment. It has been argued that the introduced principle worsened the legal situation of citizens in relation to their situation before its entry into force. The paper briefly presents the functions of law, including procedural law. This principle has been discussed and it has been established that it has a protective function. First and foremost, to ensure the security and stability of the law when the legislator has failed to fulfil its duty to legislate correctly and fairly. This function is of particular importance in cases where an administrative body unilaterally determines constitutional rights and freedoms. Resolving legal doubts in favour of the citizens is of particular importance in administrative law, which is very dynamic area (inflation and atomisation of this law), specialised (e.g. technical conditions of development) and complex due to the existence of various hierarchies of sources of law (constitution, statutes and secondary legislation, including local laws). The principle also protects other values, such as an important public interest. As a result of the comparison of the state of regulation before 2017, it was established that as long as the principle of in dubio pro libertate was a postulate of the doctrine, court judgments, interpreted from other principles of administrative proceedings, it did not suffer such significant limitations and could serve more fully to protect an entity. It the current state of law, administrative bodies can make use of it in a limited way only to several proceedings. Nor does it apply if there is – as is common in administrative proceedings – an important social interest or conflicting legal or factual interests of the parties concerned. The originality of the work results from taking into account the case law developed since the entry into force of the principle and the comparison and analysis of the situation of citizens before and after its introduction into the Code. The research carried out for the purpose of this work will be based on the comparative legal method as well as legal-dogmatic analysis, including the analysis of Polish normative material and the resulting views of the judicature and doctrine of law.

The Schengen legislation is an integral part of the EU law, which translates into a right to free movement within the “borderless area”. This right can be, however, restricted, especially in the light of threats to public safety and order – and, less frequently, to public health. The restriction imposed on account of the above has become an event without precedent in Schengen’s history of over 30 years. The legal measures implemented on borders are absolutely exceptional on a global scale. One of them is the temporary
estoration of control at the internal borders of the EU Member States. The other is the “restriction on non-essential travel to the EU”, meaning, in fact, closing of the EU external borders to citizens of third countries. One could propose a thesis that even the most significant achievements in the process of integration, including the Schengen Area, are temporarily inactivated in the face of an unpredictable supra-European threat. The mission of the EU and its Member States is to establish a new set of rules that will help the Schengen Area survive the early phase of the pandemic by suspending its main principles for some period of time. Will these new rules be extended? And if so – on what conditions? How will it affect the future of the Schengen Area? These issues have not yet been featured and discussed in scientific publications given the recency and relevance of the subject, neither have they been presented in a legal-dogmatic context

The article presents the problem related to the manner of defining a new psychoactive substance. The definition, partly contained in the provisions of the Act on Counteracting Drug Addiction of 2005, as regards the specification of the type of offense, refers to sub-statutory regulations – the ordinance of the Minister of Health. This way of defining the characteristics of a prohibited act raises constitutional doubts from the point of view of the principle of the exclusivity of the act and related rules:
1. Principles of the rule of law expressed in Article 2 of the Polish Constitution by not complying with the requirement of the principle of proper legislation.
2. The principles of nullum crimen sine lege certa arising from Article 42 paragraph 1 of the Polish Constitution, by violating the guarantee function of criminal law by violating the directive on statutory exclusivity and statutory specificity of an act.
3. Principles of the separation of powers resulting from Article 10 of the Polish Constitution by entrusting the executive authority with the powers of the legislative authority.
4. The principles of proportionality expressed in Article 31 paragraph 3 of the Polish Constitution regarding the grounds and scope of admissible limitation of constitutional rights and freedoms and the manner of limiting them.

The article discusses the issue of the possibility of regulating matters concerning higher education and its institutions in executive and internal acts. It presents the acceptable limits of delegating matters relating to higher education to regulations, as well as internal acts of higher education institutions. These limits are described taking into account the principle of autonomy of higher education institutions, as well as the rules on the creation of law, in particular the rules for issuing regulations. It was also pointed out that the incorrect division of matter between act of parliament (statute) and a regulation violates constitutional rules of law creation. It is also contrary to the protection of entities’ trust in the state and law and the principle of division and balance of power. Faulty formation of the higher education system is not good to the quality of education and conducting scientific research. It hinders the implementation of the freedom of science.

Important for the scientific and philosophical mode of thought is the issue of circumstances that lead to the emergence of such type of reflection, different from traditional ways of explaining the reality by mythological beliefs. The spiritual search of a philosophising man turned out to be a reflection upon rule, upon the all-governing principle, i.e. both the natural world (cosmos) and the relations between people. This mode of thought evolved when a need and possibility for writing down (setting out) abstract legal norms (nomos) for the sake of certainty and verifiability of judgments arose. It was vital also for the trade and in particular for ownership (civil law), whose value was abstractly expressed in monetary money. These were the crucial factors in the initiation and development of scientific and philosophical (abstract) thought. Other fundamental conditions for the development of science and philosophy included liberty, equality and respect for otherness, as well as the non-orthodox character of beliefs (myths). These were ensured by the civic, cosmopolitan and economically developed polis, particularly the democratic one. Such conditions for the development of science and philosophy have proved to be universal and timeless.

There are some typical relations that can be observed in public administration, including management, supervision, control, co-ordination and co-operation. The latter two are seldom subject to scrutiny by administration law academics. The purpose of this article is to initiate a discussion on filling this gap. In most cases, co-ordination is performed in connection with management, supervision or control. This type of co-ordination can be described as functional. However, independent co-ordination also exists. Due to the limited number of positive law regulations regarding this type of co-ordination, it is usually limited to the co-ordinating body applying non-executive measures. The co-ordination relationship in administration law is an unusual type. At least three entities are necessary for such a relationship to exist, namely a co-ordinator and two co-ordinated parties. The analysis of co-operation in public administration is possible upon considering the principle of general co-operation as a separate one. This principle could have the status of a general administration law principle, but the positive law does not currently formulate this principle directly. However, it can be derived from various applicable rules, including rules of constitutional importance. This principle dictates that all public administration entities must co-operate with each other. The article attempts to define forms of co-operation, indicating their diversity. Many issues related to co-ordination and co-operation in administration still require scientific explanation. A further stage should involve regulating these activities within the framework of the positive law. This could be implemented by future act – the “General Provisions of Administrative Law”.