The aim of the publication is to establish the function of the legal regulation of the principle of resolving legal doubts in favour of the citizen (in dubio pro libertate), introduced by the amendment of 2017 to the Code of Administrative Procedure. The purpose of the article is also to compare the state of the regulation in force at the time of its entry into force with the legal state created after the introduction of the amendment. It has been argued that the introduced principle worsened the legal situation of citizens in relation to their situation before its entry into force. The paper briefly presents the functions of law, including procedural law. This principle has been discussed and it has been established that it has a protective function. First and foremost, to ensure the security and stability of the law when the legislator has failed to fulfil its duty to legislate correctly and fairly. This function is of particular importance in cases where an administrative body unilaterally determines constitutional rights and freedoms. Resolving legal doubts in favour of the citizens is of particular importance in administrative law, which is very dynamic area (inflation and atomisation of this law), specialised (e.g. technical conditions of development) and complex due to the existence of various hierarchies of sources of law (constitution, statutes and secondary legislation, including local laws). The principle also protects other values, such as an important public interest. As a result of the comparison of the state of regulation before 2017, it was established that as long as the principle of in dubio pro libertate was a postulate of the doctrine, court judgments, interpreted from other principles of administrative proceedings, it did not suffer such significant limitations and could serve more fully to protect an entity. It the current state of law, administrative bodies can make use of it in a limited way only to several proceedings. Nor does it apply if there is – as is common in administrative proceedings – an important social interest or conflicting legal or factual interests of the parties concerned. The originality of the work results from taking into account the case law developed since the entry into force of the principle and the comparison and analysis of the situation of citizens before and after its introduction into the Code. The research carried out for the purpose of this work will be based on the comparative legal method as well as legal-dogmatic analysis, including the analysis of Polish normative material and the resulting views of the judicature and doctrine of law.

The paper shows an American model of the participation of the society in the administration of justice. It is crucial for the Polish discussion about the involvement of public factor in that manner. The analysis is divided between the constitutional right to trial by jury and the institution of justices of the peace, which is unique for the Anglo-Saxon legal system. Research conducted here is the result of a detailed analysis of the case law of the Supreme Court of the United States and selected state courts that shaped the views of the American academia on this issue. Hopefully, this brief study will help to reform the Polish judicial process.

One of the most effective systems of protection of human rights is the system defined in the European Convention of Human Rights. Until 2010, the European Court of Human Rights had rarely handled tax cases because, in principle, it excluded this category of cases from its jurisdiction in the field of the protection of taxpayer rights. Such cases had always been qualified – in accordance to the requirements of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights – as criminal or civil (property-related) cases. A major change in the ECHR’s approach to cases featuring tax-related aspects occurred in 2011. Given the protection of the right to property as set out in Protocol No. 1, the ECHR ranted taxpayers protection related to the return of value added tax in situations in which the taxpayer fulfilled their record-keeping obligations. The adopted trend in the issued decisions is seen to be dominant, but to be considered grounded, a greater number of ECHR judicial decisions than at present is needed. There is no doubt that the new tendency in the judicial decisions issued by the ECHR may have a major impact on the decisions issued by administrative courts in Poland.

The article discusses the issue of the place and presence of women in the public sphere, and tries to answer the question of how these matters are impacted by the institution of the Constitutional Tribunal. Applying the method of discourse analysis, I have examined the Polish Constitutional Tribunal’s decisions and looked into the media discussion, with both revealing dominant trends regarding women’s rights in Polish constitutionalism. Using the category of counterpublics, I also cover emancipation movements important on account of women’s rights and their presence in the public domain. I also address the common myths concerning the Constitutional Tribunal. There are also mentions of room for the materialisation of emancipation processes in Polish constitutionalism.

This paper reviews the work of Cass R. Sunstein who is a renowned and widely quoted legal scholar and a very prolific writer on a wide range of subjects. I outline herein some themes and ideas expressed in over a dozen C.R. Sunstein’s books that were published between 1993 and 2017. As the title suggests, an emphasis is placed on issues of constitutional relevance. Aiming to place Sunstein’s body of work within a larger context I trace a considerable shift in his approach to political problems and challenges from a purely legal to a more nuanced and multi-dimensional one. Accordingly I present Sunstein’s views on such issues as the partiality of constitutions, incompletely theorized agreements, judicial minimalism, the ideological component of judging, the cost of rights, and group polarization. The works of this contemporary Publius show that pursuing constitutional law in a practical way is much more than study in linguistics or compiling a constitutional court’s decisions. Cass R. Sunstein’s extensive oeuvre provides a rich material for devising new constitutional solutions to real social problems.

The paper indicates the most important arguments raised by the participants in the dispute concerning the possibility of control by the administrative courts of decisions of the President of the Republic of Poland on the refusal to appoint a judge and an attempt to make a substantive evaluation of them. In my opinion, the refusal to appoint a judge, as well as refusal to accept the judge’s position under the amended Act on the Supreme Court (SC) should be strictly exceptional and in principle be justified at the constitutional level, which should be seen as the duty of the President to ensure compliance with the Constitution. Both of these resolutions should contain the motives of the President, which would make this act, with all its arbitrariness, more transparent. This is important not only from the point of view of the person concerned, but this also has an important social dimension. The public has the right to know, not only which candidates, who met the requirements for the appointment as a judge and were recommended by the National Council of the Judiciary of Poland (NCJ), were not appointed by the President, but also what reasons were at the heart of such a decision of the Head of State.

The article is divided into two parts. The first part discusses a certain concept of secularism, where secularism is considered to be composite of three principles: separation of church and state, freedom of religion, and equality. Subsequently, the European Convention on Human Rights is reflected upon with that concept of secularism in mind. While it does not warrant separation of church and state, freedom of religion and equality are enshrined in it. Therefore, the Convention may be considered secularist to an extent. In the second part, three of the European Court of Human Rights landmark cases are analyzed with regard to secularism. While not much can be said about Kokkinakis v. Greece on its own, the comparison with Leyla Şahin v. Turkey and Lautsi v. Italy allows to point out that appearance of secu­larism (understood as one of its components – the principle of separation) provides the Court with a possibility to defer to the doctrine of the margin of appreciation and draw the focus away from the actual violation of the principles enshrined in the Convention. Finally, it is noted that the only appearance of the concept of secu­larism as a personal conviction in the Court’s judgment is inconclusive.

The article discusses the phenomenon of "tax carousels" in the tax on goods and services, which is a specific abusive practice and is used for VAT refund scam purposes. A discussion on the jurisprudential doctrine of the abuse of law and good faith as offered by the Court of Justice of the European Union is followed by an analysis of the judicial decisions (case-law) issued in this area, which proves that taxable persons involved in value-added tax fraud practice have no right to a tax deduction. Meanwhile, those taxable persons who have fallen victim to tax fraud practices may quote the good faith doctrine and exercise the right to a tax deduction. The judicial decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union have had a significant impact on the judicial decisions issued by administrative courts in Poland. The Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) tries to define the notion of a "tax carousel" in its decisions, as the notion is quite broad.

The so-called „Beasts Act" is a legal regulation, which deals with particularly dangerous perpetrators convicted by valid sentences for many years before its entry into force and concerns the proceedings against them after serving their prison sentences. Its enactment and entry into force was accompanied by a lot of legal controversy, which ultimately led to its appeal to the Constitutional Tribunal. The Constitutional Tribunal held that the inclusion of people regarded as particularly dangerous does not violate constitutional guarantees of individual rights. The Court said that the placement of the Centre is not of a criminal nature, but only administrative and it is not ruling a second time in the same case. The article critically refers to the thesis of the Constitutional Tribunal and its argumentation.