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.

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.

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 coronavirus pandemic and the economic consequences it has caused are unprecedented. For the first time ever, we are dealing with the phenomenon of a global pandemic which has undermined the foundations of market economy to such a considerable extent. The fight against it has made it necessary for the govern-ments of individual countries to make decisions radically restricting the freedom of conducting business activity – including decisions to suspend the functioning of particular economic sectors. The imposed lockdown meant that a great many of employers had to completely abandon their operations or radically limit the scope of the activities they were involved in virtually overnight, which obviously had an impact on their ability to make any profit and on their financial situation. At the same time, limiting or even cancelling the possibilities of doing business was a threat to the labour market, heralding its collapse and therefore an increase in the rate of unemployment. This is because a natural consequence of such a situa-tion is that employers decide to dismiss employees. A real threat of an economic crisis of an unparalleled scale prompted the governments of most countries to take far-reaching measures to save the economy. The Polish government imposed restrictions on the functioning of many econo-mic sectors as early as in March 2020. At the same time, there began legislative work on the so-called Anti-Crisis Shield.4 The resulting act, passed on 31 March 2020, was subsequently amended several times. The subsequent editions of the Anti-Crisis Shield featured regulations aimed at, among others, employers affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The purpose of this text is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the measures incorporated in the Anti-Crisis Shield in order to protect the interests of employers, i.e. the solutions related to the situation of employment of employees. The starting point will be an attempt to establish the rationale guiding the legislator when introducing these solutions. Then, the analysis will focus on the instruments used by the legislator to provide the protection of employers’ interests – and on the subject of protection. Finally, an attempt to evaluate the effects of these regulations will be made.

The Schengen legislation is an integral part of the EU law, which translates into a right to free movement within the “borderless area”. This right can be, however, restricted, especially in the light of threats to public safety and order – and, less frequently, to public health. The restriction imposed on account of the above has become an event without precedent in Schengen’s history of over 30 years. The legal measures implemented on borders are absolutely exceptional on a global scale. One of them is the temporary
estoration of control at the internal borders of the EU Member States. The other is the “restriction on non-essential travel to the EU”, meaning, in fact, closing of the EU external borders to citizens of third countries. One could propose a thesis that even the most significant achievements in the process of integration, including the Schengen Area, are temporarily inactivated in the face of an unpredictable supra-European threat. The mission of the EU and its Member States is to establish a new set of rules that will help the Schengen Area survive the early phase of the pandemic by suspending its main principles for some period of time. Will these new rules be extended? And if so – on what conditions? How will it affect the future of the Schengen Area? These issues have not yet been featured and discussed in scientific publications given the recency and relevance of the subject, neither have they been presented in a legal-dogmatic context

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.