This article develops the concept of "sovereign presidential lawfare" through a case study of the 2015-2024 Kami & nacute;ski and W & aogon;sik case in Poland. It reconstructs how President Andrzej Duda's use of the pardon power, through a pre-conviction "individual abolition" in 2015, became a tool for restructuring relations between the executive and the judiciary. The analysis situates the case within a broader conflict between a normativist understanding of constitutional authority, advanced by the Supreme Court and ordinary courts, and a decisionist understanding, endorsed by the President and a politically captured Constitutional Court. Drawing on contemporary readings of Carl Schmitt, the article argues that pardon powers can be repurposed to suspend judicial processes, generate de facto immunities, and reconfigure accountability without formal constitutional amendment.The article makes three contributions. First, it identifies a subtype of presidential lawfare distinct from self-protective criminal lawfare. Second, it demonstrates how constitutionally grounded prerogatives, especially those traditionally understood as exceptional or symbolic, can operate as instruments of structural constitutional change. Third, it conceptualises this dynamic as a shift from commissarial to sovereign uses of executive power.
Studies on in-house lawyers tend to suggest they rarely have to say 'no', and do so with no difficulty when they do or, conversely, find it too easy to get comfortable with questionable activity rather than say 'no'. This paper offers a different, more realistic characterisation of the 'trouble with no'. A series of sometimes emotionally raw semi-structured interviews explore the difficulties of feeling compelled to and then having to make a stand. Through examining the why and how of making a stand against their employers' preferences, we explore a psychodrama of conflicting roles, ambiguities, professional responsibilities and client-corporate loyalties. Faced with sometimes significant potential and actual impropriety, our participants acted as ethical agents, seeking to 'hold the line' against demands of servility. To make such stands, they drew on social capital, support networks and personal resilience in opposition to executive power and poor organisational culture. These assertions of professional independence profoundly penetrated the personal sphere. Whatever the outcome, they were almost always accompanied by significant vulnerability, precarity and tolls on well-being. The study provides critical evidence of the potential difficulties of exercising agency and professional independence for those practising in-house.
