The principles of „Public Procurement” are important for the proper functioning of the public procurement system. There is no doubt that principles of public procurement system have a special significance for the above mentioned system, since they indicate the direction of interpretation of provisions of the public procurement law as well as they allow a proper interpretation of the meaning of legal norms. The purpose of this elaboration is to present two basic principles of the public procurement law, i.e. the principle of fair competition and equal treatment of economic operators as well as the principle of transparency. The Author indicates the institutional expression of these principles in the procedure of awarding public procurement and indicates the violations of the principles which occur in the practice of law.

Among the institutions adopted from Roman law whose historical evolution within ius commune is particularly interesting, it is worth pointing out the issues connected with the distribution of damage incurred as a result of throwing a part of the cargo overboard from a ship due to the risk of its sinking because of overload. Deliberations of Roman lawyers, gathered under the title De lege Rhodia de iactu, were object of medieval jurists’ creative interpretation. The role of the glossators’ school representatives seems to be particularly significant here as an important contribution to the development of the European legal doctrine in subsequent centuries. In the modern era, the innovations introduced by representatives of this school were considered communis opinio doctorum and it was applied in legal practice of the Imperial Chamber Court of the Reich. Its purpose was compensation for any damage incurred in joint interest or in other people’s interest, which was reflected in the content of ABGB, the Polish Civil Code and Roman-Dutch Law.

The subject of the analysis presented in the text is an argument that tends to (and used to) be raised in the critical discourse on constitutionalism – the allegation of the so-called constitutional fetishism. The argument is to show why the constitutional discourse has lost its potential to explain and create social processes. The reason is that lawyers focus too much only on the content and interpretation of the provisions of the constitution, without considering a broader social context, which makes the constitutional discourse limited solely to legal issues with a simultaneous omission or underestimation of all other aspects of constitutionalism. This attitude of lawyers to the content of the constitution (or – in broader terms – to the provisions of law) is sometimes referred to even as idolatrous, hence the reference to the notion of fetishism in the religious sense. The aim of the text is to analyse the structure of this argument and to attempt to determine the impact it can have on
constitutionalism.

The article is based on an assumption that constitutionalism has a Janus face. A constitution is both a legal and a political act. So far, the public domain has been dominated by legal constitutionalism (constitutional dogmatics), which excludes the constitution from the public sphere, subjecting it to the authority of lawyers-experts. The contemporary political phenomena such as: new populism, illiberal democracy or new constitutionalism should shift the interest of researchers to the political aspect of constitutionalism. Constitutionalism is, therefore, a multidimensional social practice. A political game featuring many actors. And the constitutionalism of lawyers is only one of its possible interpretations. Citizens also have their own constitutionalisms, and different perspectives on constitutionalism, reflecting opposing interests, may lead to conflicts. The constitutional law dogmatics applied to resolve such conflicts would argue for the existence of a transcendental framework for their resolution. A more political approach denies the existence of such a framework. In other words, the dogmatics in question requires democracy to adapt to constitutionalism, while the political approach requires constitutionalism to adapt to democracy. The text is an introduction to a part of a volume featuring articles by authors affiliated with the Centre for Legal Education and Social Theory of the University of Wrocław.

The purpose of the article is to discuss the employee’s right to daily and weekly rest regulated in the Labour Code and having its sources in European law. The study presents the scope of standards resulting from EU treaties, directives and recommendations, which constituted a kind of road map for shaping Polish provisions in this area. Detailed analysis of art. 132 and 133 of the Labour Code shows whereas their interpretation and adopted case-law, draws attention to the shortcomings of the established norms that appear during their application in practice and also provides the basis for indicating de lege lata and de lege ferenda conclusions.

The object of the study the findings of which are presented in this article is the written statements of reasons of selected resolutions issued by the Polish Supreme Court and the dissenting opinions submitted in opposition to them. The situation of this type constitutes a relationship of two or more standpoints regarding a problem presented to a bench, referred to in the text as an opposition. The aim of the article is to offer a typology of opposition that can be reconstructed as a result of a dissenting opinion being submitted. It encompasses axiological oppositions in the strong sense and interpretation oppositions (axiological in the weak sense). Axiological oppositions in the strong sense take the form of unipolar or bipolar opposites. The examined group of resolutions has given grounds to also isolate doctrinal disputes as well as disputes over the legal nature of a given institution. The article, however, focuses only on axiological opposites. The cognitive value of the conducted analyses lies: (1) in the identification of the limited role of interpretation guidelines on the level of written statements of reasons, and (2) in the identification of the dissimilarity of situations where a votum separatum becomes an expression of an equal standpoint on the grounds of ius interpretandi considered in broad terms and situations where a votum separatum is a dissenting opinion not so much against a decision that has been made but against the legal regulation that has required this decision to be as it is.

The paper aims at reconstruction and critical discussion with the main tenets of political theory of adjudication, as presented by Rafał Mańko in his book, W stronę krytycznej filozofii orzekania. Polityczność, etyka, legitymizacja [Towards a Critical Philosophy of Adjudication. The Political, Ethics, Legitimacy]. In the paper, I demonstrate: that the interpretation of the concept crucial for the entire theory – which is the concept of political – has been chosen by Mańko in an ideological and a priori manner; that the choice above effectively prevents the realisation of the main objective of the book, which is to legitimise adjudication; that the adoption of the ethics of adjudication advocated in the book is – in the light of the basic assumptions of that very publication – both improbable and hardly acceptable. Finally, I claim that Mańko’s theory, due to its totality, can distinguish neither between legitimate law and violence, nor between justified and unjustified adjudication. As a result, it loses its critical force. All these problems are not peculiar to Mańko’s theory, but they are general weaknesses of various versions of critical jurisprudence.

The aim of the present paper is to operationalise the concept of the political in
order to make it available as an analytical category for the critical study of judicial
decisions (case law). The concept of the political is understood here, following, in
particular, Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic theory, whereby it is a dimension of a social
antagonism. Such an antagonism can be played out not only in the process of
legislation (creation of abstract and general legal norms), but also in the process of
adjudication (the so-called ‘application of law’, which, however, always has a creative
element to it). As an analytical category, the political can be operationalised
in order to subject judicial decisions to a critique which goes beyond the question
of the ‘correct’ interpretation and ‘application’ of law in a given case, but puts in the
spotlight real social, political and economic conflicts that are at stake. The analytical
framework is exemplified by judicial decisions of the European Court of Justice.

The article attempts to analyse the status of the theory of legal interpretation that
emerges from the contributions of one of the representatives of critical legal studies
(CLS). Legal interpretation is analysed by using concepts drawn from hermeneutic
universalism and the post-structural philosophy of politics. The concepts of Duncan
Kennedy, an American philosopher of law, are subjected to analysis, and his
concept of adjudication, the indeterminacy thesis and the hermeneutic of suspicion
is addressed. The paper puts forward the thesis that the political nature of law – alongside
factors closely related to social structure – is also determined by factors which
pertain to the cognitive subject. This fact has crucial importance for determining
the status of the theory of legal interpretation.

What is law and what is teaching – remains disputable. The departure point shouldbe the notio n of law, which cannot be said to exist without reference to normativity, binding power and predictability. The obstacle in teaching law is that there are several centrifugal forces resulting in disintegration of law. These are, for example: creating fake sources of law such as binding recommendations, amending laws by lower-ranking acts, which is the specialty of the EU; informally adopting the
common law doctrine of stare decisis by Continental Judges; using the interpretation of law as a fig leaf for actually amending it; demanding the disregarding of national laws by judges if they come to the conclusion that national laws are in violation of the EU law by the EU Court, even if there is no procedural framework to do so. In teaching law, a teacher should promote theories and practices conducive to the cohesion of the legal system. Teachers have to take sides in the encounter of conflicting ideas and practices in the spirit of fighting for a better law.

The subject of the analysis presented in the text is an argument that tends to (and used to) be raised in the critical discourse on constitutionalism – the allegation of the so-called constitutional fetishism. The argument is to show why the constitutional discourse has lost its potential to explain and create social processes. The reason is that lawyers focus too much only on the content and interpretation of the provisions of the constitution, without considering a broader social context, which makes the constitutional discourse limited solely to legal issues with a simultaneous omission or underestimation of all other aspects of constitutionalism. This attitude of lawyers to the content of the constitution (or – in broader terms – to the provisions of law) is sometimes referred to even as idolatrous, hence the reference to the notion of fetishism in the religious sense. The aim of the text is to analyse the structure of this argument and to attempt to determine the impact it can have on constitutionalism.

The article is based on an assumption that constitutionalism has a Janus face. A constitution is both a legal and a political act. So far, the public domain has been dominated by legal constitutionalism (constitutional dogmatics), which excludes the constitution from the public sphere, subjecting it to the authority of lawyers-experts. The contemporary political phenomena such as: new populism, illiberal democracy or new constitutionalism should shift the interest of researchers to the political aspect of constitutionalism. Constitutionalism is, therefore, a multidimensional social practice. A political game featuring many actors. And the constitutionalism of lawyers is only one of its possible interpretations. Citizens also have their own constitutionalisms, and different perspectives on constitutionalism, reflecting opposing interests, may lead to conflicts. The constitutional law dogmatics applied to resolve such conflicts would argue for the existence of a transcendental framework for their resolution. A more political approach denies the existence of such a framework. In other words, the dogmatics in question requires democracy to adapt to constitutionalism, while the political approach requires constitutionalism to adapt to democracy. The text is an introduction to a part of a volume featuring articles by authors affiliated with the Centre for Legal Education and Social
Theory of the University of Wrocław.

The article undertakes a few aspects of clarity of legal texts acts for expert and for layman. There are two different points of view and two supporting proposals, which help to understand a law (a legal text act). The article focused on following issues: (1) a meaning of clarity of legal text act (as a specialized text), (2) linguistic competence, communicative competence, legal communicative competence, (3) legal textuality discourse, (4) question of simplification as a remedy for clarity of law, (5) legal text education as a developing of legal communicative competence.

The aim of the present article is to reflect upon the ontological presuppositions of critical jurisprudence (critical legal science), understood as a set of assumptions in the domain of social ontology, which determine the identity of this form of general reflection upon law. The article proposes to identify four such assumptions: the assumption concerning the political character of the social world; the assumption on the social construction of the social world; the assumption of paninterpretationism; the assumption of the existence of epistemic communities.

This article is an attempt to explain the Platonic conception of the common good as a theory much more equivalent to the common good (as such), than modern theories that they put a man on the pedestal, instead of the community. By reference to the content of Laws and State will be presented that Plato saw his idea of a state-building manner. This is a very accurate interpretation of concern for the common good. The text was also indicated the role of the religious elements in the text of Plato’s concept.