The aim of this article is to analyze civil-military relations during the period of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of March 17, 1921, taking into account its normative aspects and constitutional practice. In particular, it attempts to answer the question of whether the March Constitution recognized the principle of civilian control over the armed forces, and, if so, what its actual implementation was like. The author discusses the following issues: the shape of civil-military relations during the so-called provisional constitution of 1918–1922; the tasks of the armed forces and the problem of their political neutrality; the regulations concerning the army contained in the March Constitution; the organization of the highest military authorities before and after 1926, and the scope of parliament’s influence on military matters. In conclusion, the author notes that the March Constitution contained elements of subordination of the armed forces to the authority of democratically legitimized state bodies. These included placing the army under the authority of the president, who could not also be commander in chief, and the assumption that the military could only be used to counter threats to internal security at the request of civilian authorities. However, these regulations were far too laconic and lacked comprehensiveness. Subconstitutional acts, in practice, excluded the army from the influence of the government and parliament, which enjoyed the highest degree of democratic legitimacy.
Renata Mazurkiewicz’s monograph is an improved version of her doctoral thesis from 2019, on the basis of which she received her academic doctoral degree in history. She based her book on a solid basis of sources, in particular civil status records from the resources of the Łoniów Parish Archive. Structurally, the book is divided into eight thematic chapters varying in length which describe, inter alia, the administrative history of Łoniów, the local parish of St. Nicholas the Bishop and its priests, and the counts of the Moszyński family – the last landowners of Łoniów – as well as many detailed social and economic matters. Using, inter alia, the records of the Bishop’s Court in Sandomierz, Mazurkiewicz describes in rather general terms two out of three ecclesiastical court proceedings for the declaration of the nullity of marriage in the family of Moszyński counts from Łoniów. The first of these (in 1888) followed a matrimonial dispute between Jerzy Moszyński and his wife Stefania, née Cielecka, who had an affair and a son with the painter Wojciech Kossak. The second was conducted in the years 1937 and 1946 by Maria Moszyńska, one of the granddaughters of the above-mentioned couple, against her husband Count Mikołaj Borch, who suffered from impotence and was incapable of physically consummating the marriage. The ecclesiastical court proceedings presented above are some of the most valuable parts of the book in terms of historical and legal aspects, although the author focused mainly on their historical description rather than their legal course in the historical context, and legal and canonical consequences. For that reason, these matrimonial proceedings in the Moszyński family from Łoniów require more extensive research conducted through the prism of court records.
The article deals with the legal aspects of just war in the Byzantine tradition and defends the view that war and its just causes in Byzantium were never based on natural law but, on the contrary, primarily on Justinian’s definition of the ius gentium. War could not be regarded as having a natural law character in Byzantium because, according to Byzantine sources, natural law applied to all living creatures and war was considered unnatural and sinful. The author argues that ideas of legitimate reasons for waging war (such as self-defense) were embedded in the ius gentium, which was linked to human rationality and social necessity, and the ius civile, which reflected specific norms of the Byzantine state, such as the position of the monarch. The author thus defends the view that the Byzantines developed, at least implicitly, a legally relevant theory of war.
This article reappraises United States v. Carl Krauch et al. (IG Farben, 1947–1948) as a formative yet incomplete precedent on corporate accountability and the criminal liability of corporate managers for international crimes. It documents IG Farben’s systematic complicity – forced labor at Monowitz and participation in the Zyklon B supply chain via Degesch – and situates the case within post-war deconcentration (Allied Control Council Law No. 9; BICO guidelines, 5 August 1948) and the subsequent emergence of Bayer, BASF and Hoechst (1951–1952). The analysis identifies a persistent corporate accountability gap: legal persons remain excluded from international criminal jurisdiction, later entrenched in Article 25(1) of the Rome Statute. The article surveys contemporary efforts to narrow this gap – the not-yet-in-force Malabo Protocol (corporate jurisdiction; environmental crimes, including hazardous wastes and illicit exploitation of natural resources), the STL’s New TV contempt ruling, French proceedings against Lafarge, and EU-level debates on the CSDDD – and advances de lege ferenda options: extending ICC jurisdiction or creating a corporate crimes chamber; adopting a binding treaty; linking soft-law duties to economic sanctions; harmonizing domestic regimes of corporate criminal liability; and establishing an international victims’ compensation fund. It concludes that effective human-rights protection requires bringing corporate actors within international criminal jurisdiction.
This article is an attempt to characterize the chamberlain, or border courts (iudicium succamerariale), one of the three types of nobility courts in the court system of the Kingdom of Poland. The paper aims to summarize the current state of research on chamberlain courts and to present the state of preservation of archival materials and the theses found in the literature on the subject so far, and on this basis to outline further opportunities for studies. The main thesis of the article is the existence of a gap in research into this part of Crown (Polish) and Lithuanian public law, the filling of which will allow for a better understanding of the system of land law courts on the territory of the Kingdom of Poland and the Crown part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
This article examines the legal regulation of joint-stock companies in Czechoslovakia, focusing particularly on the Joint-Stock Companies Act (No. 243/1949 Coll.) and its historical development. It offers a comparative analysis between the socialist-era framework and its predecessors rooted in Austrian commercial law, especially the General German Commercial Code of 1861 (ADHGB) and the Austrian Commercial Code of 1861 (AHGB). The study traces the evolution of joint-stock company law from the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the interwar Czechoslovak Republic and the communist era, culminating in the post-1989 reforms and the current Czech legal framework under the Commercial Corporations Act (No. 90/2012 Coll.). The paper highlights the ideological and political shifts that shaped the transformation from state-controlled economic models to a modern market-oriented corporate structure, while emphasizing the continuity and adaptation of legal traditions throughout these changes.
The article offers an analysis and assessment of the critical edition of the advice for Poland prepared by three well-known philosophers of the Enlightenment (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, and Paul Pierre Lemercier de la Rivière), as well as of the manuscripts preserved in the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw that were prepared for these philosophers by Michał Wielhorski, together with the record of the discussion between Mably and the Bar Confederates. The author of the article emphasizes that the texts included in the reviewed volume are of great value for research on the political thought of the Enlightenment and bringing them together in a single publication was a highly valuable scholarly initiative. However, in her view, the editors failed to meet this challenge. Their undertaking is burdened by very serious gaps and errors, both in terms of their knowledge of the relevant literature – including the fundamental studies of Jerzy Michalski – and in their editorial work on the source texts themselves. The author presents in detail the technical and substantive mistakes made by the editors and ultimately concludes that they disqualify the work as a reliable scholarly resource.
The outbreak of the January Uprising in the Russian partition awakened hopes in patriotic circles in Austrian Galicia. Some of the inhabitants of Galicia crossed the border and took part in the uprising, others were involved in clandestine activities to provide supplies for the insurgents. Noticing this process, the Austrian authorities took restrictive measures based on existing law. Mass inspections and searches, not only in the border zone, but also in the interior of Galicia, resulted in numerous arrests. They covered wider circles of Galician society – landed noblemen, intelligentsia and craftsmen. Participants in the uprising and conspiratorial activists in Galicia were tried, initially in civil courts, and, with a state of emergency being declared, in military courts. After the fall of the uprising, the Austrian authorities began to gradually lift the restrictions. Finally, on April 18, 1865, the state of emergency in Galicia ended. The restrictive actions taken by the Austrian authorities significantly limited the possibilities of supporting insurgent activities in the Russian partition. They reduced the possibilities of conducting a broader mobilization of volunteers to fight and supplying insurgent units with weapons and ammunition. They also limited the propaganda impact on the spirit of patriotism and revolution on the Polish society in Galicia.
Both large and small Prussian cities enacted numerous laws regulating fire protection. Similar provisions can be found in the Willkür, ordinances and other regulations. The subject of this article is the ordinance of one of the most important towns of the former Pomeranian Palatinate, namely, Chojnice. This document, preserved at the Max Planck Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main, represents one of the few preserved acts of this kind related to small early modern Pomeranian municipalities demonstrating efforts to safeguard the town against the unpredictable element of fire.
The article presents the issue of resolving disputes between “employers” and “employees” by the courts of the Free City of Cracow (1815–1846). This was based on the regulations of the newly implemented Napoleonic Code of 1804. It is shown that due to the scarcity of the provisions relating to contracts of lease of labor (Articles 1708–1711, 1779–1781), Cracow judges and advocates were very keen to refer to the regulations on contractual relations (Title III of Book 3 of the Code Civil). The analysis covered several cases concerning various forms of work services (lease of services). The findings were based on court files from the Tribunal of First Instance, the Court of Appeal, the Court of Third Instance and the Higher Court, stored in the National Archives in Kraków. The article is a contribution to research on the beginnings of labor law on Polish lands in the first half of the 19th century.
