Volume 42, Issue 1

The article discusses selected problems of access to justice in Poland as an important context for the rule of law crisis since 2015. The difficulties in formally addressing justiciable problems were illustrated by the findings of empirical studies conducted in 2015 and 2018. The article argues that having experienced obstacles in addressing their justiciable issues, Polish society has developed what can be termed a highly rational stance towards the legal system, which can be expected to contribute to its reluctance to actively oppose the sweeping reforms of the judiciary introduced by populists. Understanding the effects of inaccessibility of justice combined with insufficient options to resolve justiciable problems outside of the law and legal institutions is an important addition to the prevailing politics- and culture-centred approaches to understanding of the long-standing multifaceted conflict around the judiciary in Poland.

The article discusses the use of postcolonial framing in the 2019 election agenda of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość . The main argument is that the framing of contemporary EU-relations as a new colonial dependence is crucial for the understanding of the backsliding on the standards of the democratic rule of law in Poland. A detailed analysis of the 2019 agenda focuses on five selected components of postcolonial framing: (1) creolisation of elites; (2) mimicry; (3) hybridity; (4) subalternity; and (5) voicelessness. The discussion of findings zooms in on the ways in which the postcolonial framing of Poland’s position in the EU is being used to question the EU rule of law standards. Thus, the article makes a direct connection between framing the EU-Poland relations and the reasons offered in domestic politics to undermine the rule of law.

One of the key principles of the rule of law is the independence of the judiciary. This idea is usually presented in an abstract and normative way, while its meaning remains highly debatable. Leaving aside formal and legal assumptions, this article focuses on a detailed examination of a specific court – the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (CT) – an institution commonly perceived as one that has recently lost its “independence” in favour of subordination to political power. In order to show that this process is deeply complex and far from being common-sense, we replace the category of “(in)dependence” with the more appropriate notions of relative autonomy and heteronomy. Therefore, the object of a detailed analysis is the biographical trajectories of all CT judges elected between its establishment in 1985 and 2019. Applying geometric analysis to prosopographical data (a collective biography of judges), allows us to demonstrate the multidimensionality and dynamics of the autonomy (or heteronomy) of a key judicial institution and reveal hidden power relations (legal, political, religious, etc.) that go beyond the common-sense “politicization of law”.

The article undertakes an overall view of the political science contributions to federal constitutional court research in the last 15 years. It assigns the development strands to different designs and theoretical paradigms. What follows is a brief introduction into the relationship between the rule of law and constitutional courts and a short review of the relevant impulses and favoring factors within the German-speaking research landscape for this branch of research. This overview reviews then three research fields – rationalities of action, networks, and impact – are examined in more detail and their innovations and desiderata.