It is the intention of the author of this article to present the theoretical and legal views of Sigmund Freud and Emil Durkheim and to place them in the context of classical texts on political-legal theory. Both thinkers, rather associated with sociology or psychology than with law, treated law as one of the most important reference points in their social concepts. In both cases, we are dealing with the treatment of the social order as transcendent to the empirical individual, and at the same time created by society. At the same time, the law is supposed to impede the emancipation of the individual and to allow the individual to have a real influence on the creation of power structures. At the same time, despite numerous analyses of the theoretical-legal views of these thinkers in the European scientific literature, this is the first such analysis in Polish. In addition to presenting Freud’s and Durkheim’s views, it opens up the possibility of not only situating them among political-legal theories, but also points to perspectives on the operationalisation of these theories – as well as their possible social implications. To this end, the following article juxtaposes their theories with the traditions of legal positivism as represented by Hans Kelsen and Herbert L.A. Hart – two authors who were inspired by Freud and Durkheim respectively.

The article examines the application of the principle of the active role of the court in the administrative proceedings of the Republic of Kazakhstan and foreign countries. The attention is paid mainly to the identification of the main function and the system of application of this principle. The scientific novelty lies in the study of important subordinate guiding principles, the influence of which is decisive when applying the principle of the active role of the court in the administrative proceedings of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The authors conclude that the judge should apply the principle of the active role of the court in order to have a fair trial within a reasonable time.

The purpose of this publication is to show and analyse the issue of transsexual people who feel the need to reassign their sex assigned at birth and their biological sex due to a gender identity disorder. The paper is a polemic against the views presented in the case-law practice, suggesting the uniform and statutory regulation of transgender people’s situation in Polish law, drawing from the achievement of the ‘Principles’ written in Yogyakarta. One of the main postulates resulting from this publication concerns the regulation of the conditions and procedure of the legal sex transition that guarantee transsexual people the enjoyment of their fundamental rights and freedoms on equal terms with other members of society. The article is supposed to contribute to combating discrimination and increasing awareness in the area of transsexuality which is viewed stereotypically and is unknown to most people, with the exception of a small group of experts who fight against exclusion that conditioned by a different gender identity.

The resolution of the municipal council on establishing the rules and conditions of situating the objects of street furniture, advertising boards and devices, gates, their dimensions, quality standards and kinds of materials, which they can be made of (it is called thelandscape resolution’ and also the ‘advertising resolution’ in literature), is a legal tool that serves landscape protection. However justified and necessary it is, the legal definition of terms that are basic for its content is accompanied by certain structural doubts that translate into the practice of applying law. In this article, the authors identify those flaws of the applicable regulation and make suggestions of their own legal solutions, especially introducing the legal definition of the term ‘advertising medium’ (replacing the current ‘advertising board’ and ‘advertising device’), as well as the definitions of individual types of media, to the legal order. The dogmatic and legal analysis is concluded with a draft of the appropriate legal provision.

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.

The purpose of the article is to propose a concept of the collective right to food which may turn out to be essential in fighting hunger and malnutrition on a global scale. International agreements, including Pacts on Human Rights, overlook the rights of indigenous peoples by corresponding to the individualistic, state-centric, consumeristic and commercial vision of the right to food. An approach, which is based on the objectives of critical studies on law, to the official dogma of the right to food (developed within expert and intergovernmental bodies in the form of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) allows for claiming that the dogma is less legitimized than the collective right to food (defined in the Decla-ration of Atitlán) resulting from the indigenous peoples’ practice. This is why, remaining in the sphere of the official, Grotian international legal order, it should be acknowledged that the indigenous peoples’ right to food defined in the article is a part of third-generation rights (next to the second-generation individualistic right to food) while remaining strictly connected to the right to self-determination and the right to development. It is a result of the long-term practice of those peoples. The above-mentioned proposal of the third-generation right to food has not been applied to the legal doctrine so far. Its value is the opportunity to develop and study the concept of food sovereignty that allows one to more effectively combat hunger and malnutrition on a global scale as compared to the previous actions of international communities.

The rule of law does not govern all human interactions. There are times when the state bypasses legal constraints, as documented by the World Justice Project. Other times, jurisdictions may be mutually unfriendly and refuse to enforce foreign laws. Blockchains create trust between contracting parties at the individual level, enabling them to transact freely and increase consumer welfare. Blockchains can only supple-ment antitrust if the legal constraints do not impede their development. The law should thus support the decentralization of blockchains so that blockchain-based mechanisms may take over (even if imperfectly) where the law does not apply. With that in mind, we justify the attractiveness of that approach by showing that blockchain causes an increase in the number of transactions by creating trust (Part 1), and that it may overall increase the decentralization of economic transactions (Part 2). The law should take into account where it applies (Part 3). We conclude afterward (Part 4).

The publication examines the legal nature of wars, looks into the law of war genesis, reviews its conventions, as well as identifies the aim, objectives, causes together with the consequences of Russia’s military aggression on February 24, 2022; it provides a testimony on the war of aggression against Ukraine and identifies its threats to post-war international law and order. The aim of the article is to determine the background, nature, fundamentals and nature of the war the Russian Federation launched on February 24, 2022 against Ukraine within the context of confrontation with the values of Western democracy. Historical-legal dialectical, comparative-legal and system-structural methods, as well as methods of formal logic (induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, abstraction and concretization, etc.) were used to study the issues. The application of these research methods entails a cross-sectoral scientific nature.
Wars have accompanied the entire history of mankind. Since the 17th century the theoretical foundations of the law of war have been laid, which enshrined in international laws and customs of warfare (Geneva Conventions, Hague Convention, etc.) since the 19th century, thus forming the international humanitarian law. After World War II, violations of the latter by the belligerent party are viewed by the world community no less harshly than the mere war. The paper questions the purpose, reasons, conditions and intermediate consequences of the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. Obviously, the military aggression and the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022 marked the beginning of the de facto war, under a specific formal definition by a Russian official as a “special military operation” instead of naming it an attempt to avoid legal responsibility for war crimes committed in Ukraine. The article analyses the aggressive nature of this war on the part of the Russian Federation, demonstrates numerous violations of international law conventions by the Russian armed forces during the military invasion and temporary occupied territories in Ukraine. It emphasizes that the law of war has always been replaced by signing a peace treaty and relevant international agreements, which entails the obligation to severe the political, economic, and legal responsibility of the state violating international humanitarian law. The paper reviews the key institutions and legal tools for bringing the Russian Federation authorities to justice for the war crimes committed in Ukraine. So far, the President of Ukraine, the Supreme Council of Ukraine, and the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine have managed to apply legitimate international legal
mechanisms, primarily the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council, to prosecute Russia for violating the international humanitarian law and committing war crimes in Ukraine. At the same time, on the Ukrainian territories currently liberated from the Russian army’s occupation (Bucha, Gostomel, Irpin, etc.), it is already possible to implement a special mechanism of justice, which consists in the collaboration between national and international experts: specialists, investigators, prosecutors, and judges to collect objective and impartial evidence of gross violations of international law and war conventions in Ukraine. It is obvious that for Ukraine today both the victory and just punishment for the committed and continuing committed war crimes on its territory are important. The aftermath of World War II’s “Never Again” now requires, as never before, its effective guarantee and protection

The purpose of the article is to show how significant it is to ensure safety for persons
who collect and give donations during public collections. The analysis of the Act of 14 March 2014 on the Principles of Holding Public Collections (Journal of Laws of 2020, item 1672, consolidated text) leads to a conclusion that the legislator did not refer to this issue in the act in any way. However, undoubtedly, the regulation of the issue is necessary because large sums of money or donations in kind of great value are frequently collected as a result of holding public collections, and the participants are exposed to the loss of their health or even lives. In view of this fact, the author suggests introducing provisions that regulate the issue in line with the provisions included in the Act of 24 July 2015 – the Law on Assemblies (Journal of Laws of 2019, item 631, consolidated text) into the Act on the Principles of Holding Public Collections.

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 article concerns judicial integrity in its basic meaning, i.e. as the consistency of actions with beliefs. Firstly, a reconstruction of the role of a judge’s beliefs was undertaken on the basis of the philosophy law, which allowed for proving that at least on the grounds of the so-called third path theory, they are treated as essential. However, acknowledging their role raises questions about the danger of instrumentalising law by the judge and of instrumentalising the judge by the law. Ronald Dworkin’s philosophy which extensively refers to the concept of integrity was interpreted as a solution to the issue. Then, it was noted that this approach is too narrow, as it limits the possibility of including the judge’s beliefs in adjudication only when they meet the requirements of so-called appropriateness tests, and are therefore already included in the content of the legal order in some way. Furthermore, integrity in this sense does not cover the judge’s behaviours besides decision-making, the status of which increasingly requires a theoretical explanation and normative classification. In consequence, it was stated that the concept of integrity is connected with paradoxes. In spite of that, an attempt was made to design a more systematic approach to judicial integrity in adjudication and behaviour, which would lead to proving that it is something that should be cared about, and consequently, its behaviour should be made the object of normative and institutional solutions. At the same time, the concept of integrity seems to have more heuristic power than normative one.

The research objective of the publication is expressed in its content devoted to the
general analysis of the solutions adopted in the draft regulation of the European
Union on the digital asset market. The entry of this legal act into force will fill the
so-called ‘regulatory gap’ as the digital asset sector is not regulated in the EU. The
research approach has been determined by the subject of the legal analysis, namely
the provisions of the proposed new EU regulation on the digital asset market. The
study describes the proposed legal regulation and its systemic importance, as well
as indicates the similarity of the proposed solutions to well-known legal institutions
in the area of the capital market. The main theses are as follows: the proposed legal
act will order the digital asset market in terms of law (firstly); the proposed legal act
in terms of content is based on solutions provided for in the capital market law
(secondly); the proposed legal act provides for legal institutions ensuring the
so-called safety of trading (thirdly). The results should be considered original
because the publication constitutes a pioneering study on the proposed legal act.
With its entry into force (the date is unknown), a discussion on specific topics will
begin in the science of law. Therefore, it is worth speaking up and evaluating the
proposed regulation before the new law is passed. The cognitive value of the publication results from its pioneering nature, and the impact on social relations is
significant. The digital asset market is developing extremely dynamically, and the
interest in this sector is very high.

The research objective of the publication is expressed in its content devoted to the general analysis of the solutions adopted in the draft regulation of the European Union on the digital asset market. The entry of this legal act into force will fill the so-called ‘regulatory gap’ as the digital asset sector is not regulated in the EU. The research approach has been determined by the subject of the legal analysis, namely the provisions of the proposed new EU regulation on the digital asset market. The study describes the proposed legal regulation and its systemic importance, as well as indicates the similarity of the proposed solutions to well-known legal institutions in the area of the capital market. The main theses are as follows: the proposed legal act will order the digital asset market in terms of law (firstly); the proposed legal act in terms of content is based on solutions provided for in the capital market law (secondly); the proposed legal act provides for legal institutions ensuring the so-called safety of trading (thirdly). The results should be considered original because the publication constitutes a pioneering study on the proposed legal act. With its entry into force (the date is unknown), a discussion on specific topics will begin in the science of law. Therefore, it is worth speaking up and evaluating the proposed regulation before the new law is passed. The cognitive value of the publication results from its pioneering nature, and the impact on social relations is significant. The digital asset market is developing extremely dynamically, and the interest in this sector is very high.

The paper is devoted to selected issues concerning acts from the same day, i.e. 29 July 2020: the Electronic Communications Law, and the act introducing the Electronic Communications Law. Both drafts have been prepared in connection with implementing the provisions of Directive (EU) 2018/1972 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 December 2018 Establishing the European Electronic Communications Code (‘the EECC’) into the Polish legal order. Only selected issues from both draft acts were presented, for which the basic selection criterion was their significant practical importance in terms of their influence on the functioning of the telecommunications market in Poland. The purpose of the analysis and research was to answer the question whether the proposed regulations were compliant with the EECC and whether, from the perspective of the requirements of practice, effective solutions had been adopted. The analysis was based on comparing the projected EECC regulations and on possible practical consequences after their implementation. The analysis covers the projected provisions – from the Polish law and the EU law. The conducted analysis indicated a need for modifying them, in particular: imposing security obligations; the scope and manner of replacing the existing documents for customers with new ones; the conditions of customerv ideo verification; transitional provisions. The article presents proposals for specific amendments to the projected provisions. The presented issues are not only of theoretical importance, but also of great practical importance when it comes to the functioning of the telecommunications market and, above all, when it comes to customerswho use telecommunications services

Fixed establishment (FE) is one of the institutions of the EU value added tax system; its structure is essential to correctly determine the right tax jurisdiction of an EU Member State for the purpose of VAT settlement in situations of cross-border provision of services. However, the legal structure of a FE adopted by the EU legislator (and, consequently, adapted to national legislation of the Member States) causes uncertainty when it comes to its interpretation. In the absence of unambiguously defined conditions in EU law to consider a specific presence and activity of an enterprise to be a FE, interpretation rules contained in judicial decisions
issued by the Court of Justice of the EU play an important role. Among attempts
made by the CJEU to clarify the ‘blur areas’ resulting from the dynamics of modern
business processes, one of the most interesting ones is the possibility of considering
a subsidiary to be a fixed establishment for a parent company. The purpose of this
paper is to analyse legal and economic factors, the fulfilment of which may constitute a condition for considering a subsidiary to be a fixed establishment for
a parent company, with particular emphasis on the ruling of the Court of Justice
of 7 May 2020 in the Dong Yang case (C-547/18).

The paper analyses the Guidelines issued in 2020 by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau in Poland on the establishment and implementation of effective compliance programmes in the public sector. These guidelines constitute the very first Polish official document referring to compliance in the public sector. Its detailed critical analysis is therefore useful for the construction of compliance policies by public institutions, in order to prevent and possibly detect irregularities, including corruption, within these organisations.

One of the main provisions in shaping legal obligations between the parties is the freedom of contract. Although the parties are free to choose the provisions of their agreement, the content and the aim of the contract cannot contradict the essence and nature of the contract of employment, the act and the principles of the community life. Thereby, in order to engage an employee based on a long term contract of employment for a specified period, along with a short, two weeks notice termination period, justified and rational presumptions should be in place. In other words, taking into consideration current provisions of law, long term contract of employment is acceptable; however its validity is depended on the circumstances of each individual case.

In the Roman inheritance law, until post-classical law, the appointment of an heir on the basis of the rule heredis institutio caput et fundamentum totius testamenti est, was the foundation of the whole will. Heredis institutio was a crucial element of the content of the will and it should be placed in the very beginning as all dispositions placed before it, were void. And remained this way until Justinian law where the above mentioned formalism was annulled. First exceptions of the rule heredis institutio caput et fundamentum totius testament est and the order arising from testamentary dispositions placed therein, can be noticed in classical law, according to the constitution of custody, appointment to inherit by the own slave together with his liberation and disinheritance. Moreover, Roman law, based on the performance of praetors and Cesar law, exceptionally allowed the maintenance if the rest of the testamentary content (demises, trusts, liberations) when the heredis institutio fell or did not lead to inheritance. And so, the acceptance of the heir appointed in a will becomes a sole formality in classical law, and a range of deviations and exceptions appear in the discussed rule Heredis institutio caput et fundamentum totius testamenti est. The Western Roman post – classical practice and Justinian omitted the above mentioned rule totally.