The authors – lawyers and licensed detectives – examine the topic of an ethic in detective’s profession from theoretical and practical grounds. Although the authors are well positioned to delve into theoretical aspects of this topic, thanks to their strong academic background, the key input into the research is the practical experience they have gained while performing the profession; the profession they sadly acknowledge have some imperfections as well. Based on their own experience and observations the starting point of their work is the study of detective’s profession ethos. The angle of their examination is different to a traditional approach presented in other’s publication available on the market. The authors, in an innovative and original way, claim that the detective’s ethos is a result of profession’s elitism and exclusivism. The profession’s ethos has to be examined in the light of legal grounds in the Polish law system, the Act of 6 July 2001 on detective services (O.J. 2002 No. 12, Item 110, as farther amended). An extensive analysis of the act, brought a conclusion, that detective’s profession is elite, although authors have noted that there are certain reservations on this thesis, however they have
asserted that the profession is not exclusive, which is reflected in the instances of some ethic and moral violations, the topics they strictly separate. The reason of the abovementioned shortcomings is not sufficiently stringent procedure of the profession’s recruitment, which is a consequence of an easier access to the detective’s license, granted by the Act of 13 June 2013 on deregulation of access to certain professions in Poland (O.J. 2013, Item 829), effective as of 1 January 2014. The authors call for restoration of previously existing restrictions with this regard. The authors notice as well that there is a politically-driven reluctance to empower the representatives of the private security sector, hindering the fulfilment of a social role the detectives play as the agents of public trust. The authors however do not omit in their work the acknowledgement of a good condition of polish detective sector which one can see in the comparative cross-country international examination. They point out to the benefits and opportunities stemming from this condition, partly noticed by The Polish Association of Licensed Private Investigators – the representative body of detectives in Poland, which not only became a member of The International Federation of Associations of Private Detectives but also adopted the Code of Detective’s Ethics. The former is a unique opportunity to gain
expertise from international community as well as to share its own experiences, perhaps become a European leader setting internationals standards and guidance for the detective profession; the latter, authors believe, should be perceived as the code of exemplary conduct, one which all detectives shall follow. It is worth to mention that the mentioned Code of Detective’s Ethics is unique in its own nature on the Polish market as there is no other code encompassing the topic of detective’s ethic

The Greek polis is the birthplace of a culture whose influence persisted despite the fall of the very form of polis. This culture plays a significant part in the life of communities of today, especially in the domain of the so-called Western culture. Polis means both state and city, but most of all it is “a society, a community of people living together”. This form of governance enabled equal citizens to exercise direct supervision over their governments. Polis itself was not an invention of ancient Greeks, but the public nature thereof, especially in the form of the debate-based democracy and the rule of law – not of people – turned out to be their contribution to the idea of a city-state. Democracy as a common form of a political system can be found particularly in the Greek culture of polis. The general notions deriving from the Greek polis, i.e. citizenship, democracy, equality, independence, autonomy or justice, express a desire for a better life of an individual in a community. The democracy of classical times, characterised by equal citizenship and freedom of speech, is considered as the first one to moderate fierce social-economic disputes. It is this polis that made it possible for philosophy and science to develop. The modern-day discussion on the state in a globalised and increasingly urbanised world can surely benefit from a reflection on the civil and legal dimensions of polis.

The aim of the article is to outline the relationship between the rule of law and civic engagement in the public sphere and to attempt to answer the question whether the rule of law can be an effective tool in preventing the transformation of democracy in a tyranny of the majority; whether it can also create optimal conditions for democracy to develop. In other words, does the rule of law serve democracy and political engagement or does it rather limit the spontaneity of civic activity because stability cannot be reconciled with the freedom of citizens? The current “juridification” of the public domain (the expansion of law into various areas of social existence) marginalises the validity and scope of civic presence in the decision-making process in the name of law-abidingness and the neutrality of instruments of control and of choices made by the ruling power. Can the effective solution to this situation be the opening of the concept of the rule of law to the idea of political nature and the expansion of the domain of grassroots participation?

Modernity understood as a permanent crisis of legitimacy and authority is a constant challenge for constitutionalism. The article reconstructs the danger of substituting political nature with moral imperatives. In modern societies, political disputes turn into so-called culture wars, and the dividing lines are marked by two moralities fighting each other: a liberal morality and a conservative morality. Using selected examples from the constitutional judiciary, I put forward a proposal of rethinking the definition of political nature in constitutionalism to deal with the crisis of legitimacy and authority that plagues it.

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.

Tax policy, perceived as a long-term and rational activity which aims to achieve specified legal, economic and social goals has always been connected with the problem of political power within the frames of a given tax system. Regarding the nature of membership in the European Union, issues of tax policy should be analyzed in the context of a ulticentric tax system, since both creators and addressees of political actions remain in a diverse regime of domestic, European and international tax law. The author discusses the legal basis of this phenomenon, which attributes to the complementary nature of the tax policy, reflecting on the conditions and limitations
in the light of challenges to be faced by contemporary tax systems.

The choice of the formula of justice is being made by a law enacting body. In a democratic state parliament, or a political body is the main source of formulae of justice,
out of the nature of things dominated by political discourse. Here we touch the most significant problem of enacting fair and just law: considerations on the topic of justice reveal a connection of the choice of the formula of justice with philosophy. The compromise of philosophy co-acting in the twentieth century with totalitarian systems refuted then ultimately a myth about a possibility of direct translation of philosophical categories to political categories. The political practice of a liberal democratic state rejects the idea of metaphysics, which would determine the current purposes of the politics. There is a suggestion that democracy faces philosophy in the order of thinking. In spite of such attitude, the author decides to allow for philosophical establishing of the liberal-democratic state, but also allowing for the simultaneous realizing that it is by itself justified as the most reasonable political practice of the state. The philosophy may justify democracy only accepting in turn itself as a variant of a democratic discourse, although the only one which is able to have some distance to mere assumptions of philosophy, without ceasing in this way it is being a democratic discourse. Such philosophy is actually the hermeneutics of politics.

The article concerns real and potential reactions of jurisprudential discourses to the phenomenon of the crisis of liberal democracy. The author argues that liberal democracy has been a hegemonic structure – meaning that not only has it been dominant in the factual sense in the broadly understood Western legal and political culture but it has also effectively suppressed any competing discourses. Today, the hegemony of demoliberalism is being questioned. The new state of affairs causes a range of complications that
jurisprudential discourses have to deal with. The author considers three possible scenarios of the reaction of these discourses to the said crisis. The first of them means a shift towards democratic authoritarianism. The second is about remaining in a collective hypocrisy, waiting for a change in the current intellectual climate. The third involves accepting the political nature of jurisprudence and making the concept of agonistic democracy a reality.

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 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.

The aim of the article is to analyse the problem of the political nature of judicial decisions through a reconstruction of the ways of interpreting the relationship between law and political values in the contemporary philosophical-legal discourse. The considered problem has been presented from the perspective of such a concept of law that recognises law as a practice of a certain political community. The author attempts to reconstruct the contemporary understanding of the political nature of law viewed as rejecting the voluntarist and individualist paradigms and adopting the phronetic and community paradigms instead.

In the article, I contrast the contemporary legal dogma with the challenges underlying the political nature of law and judicial practice. Both the Continental jurisprudence and the judicial decisions issued by European courts are dominated by the dogmatic current – and treated as politically neutral acts. My intention is to carefully verify this quite common belief in this paper. Making use of H. Berman’s views, I assume that the present shape of jurisprudence and the judicial practice based thereon have been established as a result of political conflicts and that the legal dogma is capable of neutralising and solving modern-day political conflicts precisely because of the qualities of the said shape. It is therefore both a political and an apolitical activity. But this paradox is only apparent. In its strive to keep its paradigm alive, the dogma should be flexible in reacting to the challenges occurring in its political environment. It can – and should – modify the “buffer” of the theory upon which it is set in order to retain its core. In the article, I try to answer the question about the boundaries of the possible adaptation of jurisprudence and juridical practice with respect to claims raised by the domain of politics – claims currently articulated as the strongest by the so-called critical theories of adjudication. The final part of the paper is an attempt – based on the example of theses formulated in monograph
by R. Mańko, W stronę krytycznej filozofii orzekania – to outline the said boundaries.

As we are nearing the end of the first 25 years of the 21st century. What is increasingly noticeable is the growing dysfunction and pathology of big systems and of their elements, including – given the omnipresent interrelations and interdependencies – entire masses of smaller entities, together with micro- and family businesses. The author asks a question of whether it could be reasonable to consider returning to some of the assumptions, instruments, and methods adopted within the framework of the systems approach from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, which was originally
conceived and created to treat big systems. Do the achievements made in the field of research in recent decades make it possible to bridge the cognitive gaps that determined the failure of the systems approach in the past century? These gaps are mainly the social mechanisms of functioning of organised systems. There is absolutely no doubt that we have seen huge progress in this domain, mostly thanks to interdisciplinary research and research conducted in recently-emergent “hybrid” disciplines like economic or organisational sociology and psychology, sociology and psychology
of management, behavioural economics, behavioural finance, contemporary political
economics, but also hybrid legal sciences such as: economics, sociology, and politics of law, political sciences and strategic analyses. The author argues that we need an attempt of a certain reactivation of the systems approach in the context of diagnostics and treatment, meaning a redesign of entire organisational systems– or dynamic connections in a networked structure, actually. It is necessary to modify the classical procedure of systems analysis and adapt it to the specific nature
of the changeable networked structures of the 21st century.

This paper deals with the activity of the public administration of the Czech Republic. It analyses the structure and mechanisms of the functioning of the institutions of public administration and self-government of the Czech Republic. It appeared not so long ago that responsible persons were held accountable for wrong decisions – of both technical and political nature. In some cases, these decisions were also used against responsible persons at all levels. This research is based on the analysis of the present Czech legal norms and their application in the decisions made by local administration.

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 aim of the article is to outline the relationship between the rule of law and civic engagement in the public sphere and to attempt to answer the question whether the rule of law can be an effective tool in preventing the transformation of democracy in a tyranny of the majority; whether it can also create optimal conditions for democracy to develop. In other words, does the rule of law serve democracy and political engagement or does it rather limit the spontaneity of civic activity because stability cannot be reconciled with the freedom of citizens? The current ‘juridification’ of the public domain (the expansion of law into various areas of social existence) marginalises the validity and scope of civic presence in the decision-making process in the name of law-abidingness and the neutrality of instruments of control and of choices made by the ruling power. Can the effective solution to this situation be the opening of the concept of the rule of law to the idea of political
nature and the expansion of the domain of grassroots participation?

The Greek polis is the birthplace of a culture whose influence persisted despite the fall of the very form of polis. This culture plays a significant part in the life of communities of today, especially in the domain of the so-called Western culture. Polis means both state and city, but most of all it is “a society, a community of people living together”. This form of governance enabled equal citizens to exercise direct supervision over their governments. Polis itself was not an invention of ancient Greeks, but the public nature thereof, especially in the form of the debate-based democracy and the rule of law – not of people – turned out to be their contribution to the idea of a city-state. Democracy as a common form of a political system can be found particularly in the Greek culture of polis.
The general notions deriving from the Greek polis, i.e. citizenship, democracy, equality, independence, autonomy or justice, express a desire for a better life of an individual in a community. The democracy of classical times, characterised by equal citizenship and freedom of speech, is considered as the first one to moderate fierce social-economic disputes. It is this polis that made it possible for philosophy and science to develop. The modern-day discussion on the state in a globalised and increasingly urbanised world can surely benefit from a reflection on the civil and legal dimensions of polis.