The article of a review character undertakes a polemic with the authors of the book edited by M. Nowak entitled The Role of the Law in the Spatial Management System on spatial planning and development presented from the perspective of the law. The authors undertook to present the role of law in the spatial management system, but they did so taking into account the fact that in spatial planning, apart from lawyers, there are also such participants as urban planners, city and landscape architects, officials and the public. In the book there are not only material legal accents embedded in the themes of environment, cultural landscape and monuments, but also procedural threads. There are issues of a general nature, concerning the role and interpretation of the law, interdisciplinary issues, reach ing into other sciences (economics, urban planning), specific issues (fee) and issues of a changing and dynamic nature (COVID-19 and spatial policy). The work strongly emphasises the axiological dimension with references to phrases such as public interest or common good. In good conscience, I recommend reading the book to all those interested in ‘planning law’ in the broadest sense of the term, and to those who prefer the intersection of legal and non-legal sciences. The book will also appeal to the academic community and the legal profession.

Queen Elizabeth II died on 8 September 2022, at the age of 96 and after the longest reign in British history. Her death brings up the question of what the future holds for the monarchy. The paper explores the monarch’s role – both at home and abroad – as head of state. It also analyses how the new king will have to adapt to socio-political and demographic changes the United Kingdom has been going through. Britain is now recovering from Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic and dealing with the ongoing economic crisis and growing calls for Scottish independence and the change of status of Northern Ireland. The Queen successfully navigated the monarch’s constitutional political neutrality, but the new circumstances raise key questions about what kind of King former Prince Charles will be and whether public support for the monarchy will outlive support for Elizabeth II.

In our presentation, we review the procedure and method of meeting the electoral bodies of different (mainly European) countries – in particular the issue of ensuring the publicity and extent to which they can operate online. In addition, we examine in more detail the practice and procedural method of the Hungarian electoral bodies, in particular the National Election Commission. Based on the above, we also outline the possibilities for the further development of Hungarian practice. Our main findings: it is clear that although online meetings of election commissions are still used only in several countries, but the COVID-19 epidemic has highlighted the need to open up to the online space not only in the election process but also in the practice of individual election bodies. The regulations of the Hungarian National Election Commission define the rules of online meetings in great detail. This makes Hungary one of the few EU countries where it is possible to meet by videoconference. In our opinion, this direction will become decisive in the EU countries in the coming years. Moreover, we do not consider it inconceivable that the entire electoral process (including remote voting) should be digitised, as is the case in Estonia. However, this still requires many steps to be taken by individual countries to increase voter confidence in digitisation. For now, however, we have to be satisfied with one of the positive benefits of the COVID-19 epidemic: the ability to online meetings of election commissions.

The necessity of providing healthcare to citizens is one of the basic principles of every state, regulated by provisions of national, EU or international law and comple-mented by soft law. Civilisational changes and technological advancement make it possible to develop new healthcare tools and services (i.a. telemonitoring, telecon-sulting, telerehabilitation and electronic medical documentation). The COVID-19 pandemic greatly emphasised the need to provide such services. The wide use of e-health, however, which may be a remedy for numerous problems that the health-care sector is wrestling with, requires securing the rights of those who are not digitally included, especially the elderly. The prevalence of various degrees of digital exclusion, not only among the elderly, makes these issues socially significant and they should be solved by law. The purpose of the article is an initial analysis of the validity of developing e-health services in the ageing society in Poland and a presentation of proposals for adjusting legal solutions as regards the use of digital tools in healthcare to the changing reality.

Protection of children against sexual exploitation, particularly against exploitation in cyberspace, constitutes one of the most burning issues of the modern world. The Internet is frequently used as the beginning of the road to sexually exploiting a child, and as way of earning the child’s trust and gaining physical access to them. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic and isolation resulting from it brought with them substantial threats, also in this area, whose effects will be long-term. What was observed during the pandemic was not only an increase in online traffic related to the distribution of child pornography, but also a definite increase in behaviours that may be classified as grooming. It is sometimes considered that grooming is the basic method leading to child sexual exploitation, or even its immanent feature. Relatedly, what becomes an important issue is an analysis of legal regulations that concern grooming in cyberspace, and an attempt to answer the question whether the scope and level of protection provided to children by Polish criminal law are sufficient.

The subject of the article is an analysis of the legal solutions governing the princi-ples of handling medical waste and municipal waste produced by people under quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic together with an analysis of the impact of the instruments specified therein on the existing legislative solutions and the prospective effects of the adoption of these regulations. The paper analyses the current legal framework, highlighting the uniqueness of the legal institutions used (in the context of a province governor’s orders excluding local law regulations or statutory obligations, and contracts specifying the manner of performance of public tasks entrusted), as well as the impact of these regulations on the subsequent operation of waste management facilities. At the same time, a number of practical problems that may arise in connection with the application of solutions provided under the existing law have been brought to light.

The paper discusses the procedure before the guardianship court regarding granting so-called surrogate approval of providing a healthcare service, particularly vaccination against COVID-19, to persons who are unable to make a conscious decision in this regard for objective reasons – health or age. The currently applicable provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure and the Act on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Professions were analysed. Due to lack of any separate procedural regulation of procedure in this regard, special attention was paid to the right court representation of the person whom the approval concerns and to the issue of gathering and assessing evidence. The authors’ goal was in particular to evaluate legal loopholes noticed in practice and to indicate possible practical and procedural solutions, which is specifically essential in the current epidemiological situation, as nowadays these types of proceedings constitute a significant percentage of cases examined by courts.

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the legislator decided to increase the capacity of public administration to operate. Therefore, the provisions of the special act introduced additional tools for the voivode. As a result, a special type of voivode’s „command” was introduced into the legal system. He can now outsource activities to selected authorities and entities in his voivodeship. The paper attempts to locate this new competence in the catalog of legal forms of the voivode’s activity and an attempt to perform a systemic assessment of the compliance of this instrument with the existing models of administrative law.

The article examines theoretical and practical problems concerning the realisation of participatory democracy’s potential for forming and implementing state policy on counteracting epidemics. The article is aimed at the study of participatory democracy as a tool of state’s interaction with the public while counteracting epidemics throughout history, from antiquity to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Comparative, comparative legal, systemic-structural, dialectical, historical and other scientific methods have been employed to examine the issues discussed in the article. The application of the aforementioned methods is conducted on the interdisciplinary scientific basis.

The COVID-19 pandemic, placing societies and governments in an exceptional situation in every respect, has had an impact on the legal order of individual countries. It pressed them, on the one hand, to take swift and decisive actions and, on the other hand – to a necessary thorough assessment and considering of the costs and consequences, both legal and economic, of the introduced measures, often related to the constraints of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties. Although Sweden during the pandemic seemingly chose a path different from other European countries, keeping social life largely unaffected, in its essence this strategy did not differ much from those used in other countries. The aim of the article is to present the solutions adopted in Sweden and to analyse the Swedish strategy against the background of constitutional civil liberties.

The aim of the research was to identify conditions and forms of international and cross-border cooperation of Polish higher education institutions (HEIs). In order to achieve the goal, the formal-dogmatic method was applied, analyzing the literature on the subject, the law (mainly Polish law), as well as various statements and press releases. A request for public information was also used. The article was divided into three parts. The first one concerns the conditions of international and cross-border cooperation of Polish HEIs. The next part covers the forms of cooperation identified by the author, and the last one refers to the formula of the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation as a form of international and cross-border cooperation of HEIs. The results of the research show that international and cross--border cooperation of Polish HEIs is based primarily on national law, which, however, is characterized by high variability, which does not favour building stable relations. The cooperation of HEIs takes various forms, from non-institutionalised to quasi institutionalised and institutionalised. Polish HEIs are trying to join the internationalization process, and the availability of external funding is conducive to gradual institutionalization of international and cross-border cooperation
of HEIs. There is a scarcity of studies on the subject, therefore the article may be
of great cognitive value to legal science, especially in Poland, but also abroad (for
scholars conducting comparative research).

The recent pandemic has forced us in 2020 to rethink the priority of access to medical care. The purpose of this article is to offer a brief account of how two countries – Sweden and the US – have reacted to the pandemic. The authors wish to show how the functions of the regulations and guidelines applied by hospitals and institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic differ from the objectives of health policies based on the principles of the distributive justice theory. The article will thus risk a preliminary assessment of the role of law in a crisis. A short summary of the main points of the distributive justice theory will be followed by an analysis of two cases: the guidelines issued by local authorities in Sweden and the American models applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. The conducted analysis results in a thesis that the objective of the justice theory differs from the regulations actually applied. In the case of Sweden, the recommendations seem to clearly prioritise the life of young people over the life of the elderly, even if there is no shortage of resources. In the case of the United States, we can see more objectives of distributive justice implemented in the analysed triages, but they are still not free from discrimination. The authors therefore call for an improvement of mobility of medical care resources in order to mitigate crises. The cognitive value has an international quality, and is aimed at Polish audiences dealing with the problems in question, be it at the level of a hospital or legislation.