Zastosowanie pojęcia „uczuć religijnych” w art. 196 Kodeksu karnego, penalizującego ich obrazę, może wydawać się krokiem w kierunku społecznego kompromisu, łączącego światopoglądową neutralność państwa z ochroną imaginarium religijnego przez prawo. Tym samym sformułowanie to mogłoby być zręcznym rozwiązaniem legislacyjnym służącym koncyliacji i spójności społecznej. Niniejszy artykuł ma za cel omówienie negatywnych konsekwencji sformułowania art. 196 Kodeksu karnego w kategorii „uczuć religijnych”. Skupienie się na negatywnych implikacjach obecności tej frazy w prawie służyć ma pokazaniu, iż nie spełnia ona pokładanych w niej oczekiwań: nastręcza trudności interpretacyjnych, brakuje jej cech dobrego prawa, jest daleka od realizmu psychologicznego oraz dzieli i polaryzuje społeczeństwo zamiast je spajać. Pokazuję, w jaki sposób problemy te wynikają właśnie z przyjęcia kategorii uczuć religijnych. W pierwszej części artykułu identyfikuję i omawiam konsekwencje wynikające z takiego sformułowania dla dogmatyki prawa. Druga część pracy poświęcona jest implikacjom tej frazy na gruncie teorii prawa, w kontekście postulatów jurysprudencji. Trzecia część analizuje skutki sformułowania w dyskursie publicznym i szerszej sferze społecznej, przyjmując perspektywę ekspresyjnej funkcji prawa. Tekst przynosi nowe spojrzenie na zagrożenia wnoszone do prawa przez przyjmowaną frazeologię oraz na specyfikę odwołań do emocjonalności w dyskursie prawnym, jednocześnie oferując sugestie potencjalnych rozwiązań.

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a tool that allow predicting the environmental
effects of a project. Undoubtedly, the basic element of the EIA is the EIA report: and if so, the question arises who is qualified to prepare the report. The purpose of the study is to present the evolution of the rights of EIA report experts from the 1970s to modern times, presented from the perspective of legal sciences. The implementation of the amended Directive 2011/92 took place from 1 January 2017 by introducing formal education criteria and / or experience for EIA experts, which were softened by the amendment of 19 July 2019. In the study, I put forward the thesis that there is a tendency in Polish legislation
to lower the requirements for EIA experts, which makes national regulation contrary to the spirit of Directive 2011/92. Research methods used in the study include primarily the dogmatic approach, the method of consistent interpretation, and – to a lesser extent – the comparative and historical method.

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a tool that allow predicting the environmental effects of a project. Undoubtedly, the basic element of the EIA is the EIA report: and if so, the question arises who is qualified to prepare the report. The purpose of the study is to present the evolution of the rights of EIA report experts from the 1970s to modern times, presented from the perspective of legal sciences. The implementation of the amended Directive 2011/92 took place from 1 January 2017 by introducing formal education criteria and/or experience for EIA experts, which were softened by the amendment of 19 July 2019. In the study, I put forward the thesis that there is a tendency in Polish legislation
to lower the requirements for EIA experts, which makes national regulation contrary
to the spirit of Directive 2011/92. Research methods used in the study include primarily the dogmatic approach, the method of consistent interpretation, and – to a lesser extent – the comparative and historical method.

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 aims to cover the issue of foreign entities having a “fixed establishment” in a given country. A phenomenon discussed at length in recent months, but one that entities conducting digital business seem to have not really explored in great detail in the context of determination of the principles of taxation of VAT transactions. In this article, we will attempt to analyse the definition of FE on the basis of both binding legal regulations and the existing Polish and EU judicial decisions. At the same time, we will try to answer the question about the impact of the practice of tax authorities pursued in the area of interpretation of the conditions for a FE to be established on the stability of tax settlements of taxpayers operating in the digital industry. In addition to that, the authors will also try to arrive at a balance among the current views on FE, which depict Poland from the tax administration perspective as a country with highly unstable tax practices, detached from logical arguments and unaware of the nature of business.

The subject of this paper is the taxation of a security transfer of title to a fixed property with the tax on goods and services. The author focuses on the interpretation of the term “paid supply of goods” in the context of a security transfer of title. The objective of the following considerations is to establish whether a security transfer of a title is a chargeable event, and to indicate the moment in which the tax becomes chargeable on the grounds of the goods and services tax and in the light of the absence of a consistent practice of the tax authorities as well as divergent judicial decisions of administrative courts on the matter.

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.