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In the current legal order there are two ways of regulating economic law. According to the dualist concept, economic relations are treated as separate from civil law relations, while, according to the principle of the unity of civil law, the aspects of economic turnover are a specialized part of civil law. In Poland, the dualist concept was replaced under communist authoritarian rule by the principle of the unity of civil law in order to emphasize the low usefulness and lack of practical relevance of economic turnover, which was replaced almost entirely by socialized turnover conducted by economic units with state status. Despite the departure from totalitarian rule and in the current system of social market economy, the principle of the unity of civil law has persisted. The paper shows that the principle of the unity of civil law, although instrumentally treated by authoritarian governments, has a number of advantages that allow it to function successfully in the conditions of freedom of entrepreneurship in the European Union and in the face of political changes that took place in Poland at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the answer that Dworkin’s philosophy of law provides to the following question: what is the threshold of wickedness of the legal order that excuses citizens from the moral obligation to obey the law? This is not a problem of civil disobedience (which only contests a particular decision of making or applying the law), but a situation in which the whole political-legal system is the object of moral contestation. The task will be carried out in three steps. In the first one, I will outline Dworkin’s theory of political obligation, situating it in the broader framework of the debate on this obligation. In the second step, I will analyse one of the main elements of this theory, namely the legitimacy of the legal order. As a third step, I will draw attention to a rather — as it seems — surprising similarity between Dworkin’s argumentation and Radbruch’s formula.

This essay assumes that readers will be familiar with Wight’s analysis distinguishing three traditions of thinking about international politics and will therefore recognize ‘three types’. The ‘three groups’, Wight observes, consist of (1) ‘idealists’ and ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘Utopians’ committed to serving the ‘general will’ and ‘the cause’; (2) ‘moralists’ and ‘Grotians’ dedicated to upholding treaties and the rule of law; and (3) ‘realists’ and ‘Machiavellians’ concerned with calculating how to defend and advance ‘the national interest’. With regard to survival imperatives, however, Wight holds that ‘all statesmen are realists’. He also qualifies this exposition of three traditions of thinking about international relations by pointing out that some Grotians and moralists have championed ‘a different Utopia’, an ideal distinct from the revolutionary uniformity sought by certain religions and ideologies. This different Utopia was the League of Nations, an institution designed to bring about a peaceful universal legal order. The League’s advocates expected a majority of nations, backed by world public opinion, to maintain peace and order through rational appeals and, if necessary, economic sanctions, with war as a final recourse to restore international amity.

Összefoglaló. A világjárvány a Föld minden országát fenyegeti. Az ellene folytatott küzdelem eredményeit és kudarcait akkor lehet felmérni, ha a veszély elmúlt. Addig csak a vírus támadásának a más társadalmi kockázatoktól eltérő egyedi tulajdonságai tárhatóak fel. Tanulmányozásra várnak az egyes országokban bevezetett rendkívüli intézkedések és az Egészségügyi Világszervezet (WHO) globális védekezésre tett kezdeményezései. Summary. The time has not yet come for a comprehensive assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic situation. At this stage, it is possible to collect information, formulate incomplete hypotheses, and define possible research directions and methodology. With this in mind, our paper will focus primarily on domestic practices. We will study the legislation, the constitutional basis of the special legal order, the functioning of public administration organisation, the reactions of criminal substantive and procedural law and, finally, the changed tasks and functions of law enforcement administration in the emergency situation. On the basis of the information available to us, we are seeking answers to three questions. Firstly, can the pandemic be considered a global threat to societies, one with specific characteristics that are different from all other threats? Secondly, what role do the state, government in general, and public administration authorities and law enforcement in particular, have to play in combating the pandemic? Thirdly, can international cooperation achieve such a level of global capacity for action that is needed to tackle the global threat? In response to the first question, the study describes the specificities that justify the uniqueness of the pandemic in nine points: the classification as the highest risk, the three hazards theory, the incomparable nature of the consequences of pandemics and natural disasters, the exclusion of any prior consideration of risk-taking, the application of the tolerable and intolerable distinction, the inconsistency of the typology of internal and external risks, a characteristic that cannot be predicted by legislation, the mathematical measurability of consequences, and the impact on the world economy. Our second aim was to present the domestic practice of combating the epidemic through the special legal order, drawing on the evaluations of legal scholars on the subject published since 2020. We have reviewed the constitutionality of the special legal order, its impact on central state and municipal administration, on substantive and procedural criminal law, and on law enforcement administration. Attention was paid to a specific institution dictated by the exceptional situation: the hospital command system. The police officers temporarily appointed to this post are responsible for supporting the organisational work in health institutions, which cannot include medical activities requiring medical training. The third theme focused on the World Health Organisation’s response to the epidemic from a global perspective. We recalled that the idea of an international treaty was first raised by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, at the Paris Peace Forum in November 2020 and subsequently endorsed by the G7 leaders on 19 February 2021. EU leaders then expressed their commitment to start work on the preparation of an international treaty on pandemics in the framework of the World Health Organisation. We are convinced that this threefold approach will be worth pursuing when the opportunity arises to assess good and bad practices in epidemic management. However, this will be a task for the post-COVID era.

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to illuminate the interdependent relation and connectivity between state and regime known as the state-regime-nexus. To conceptualize the reciprocal institutional relation between state and regime and to deepen the understanding of the state-regime-nexus, I focus on law and legal order as one mutual linkage between state and regime in both democratic and autocratic regimes. To do so, this conceptual paper addresses two points that are part of the same topic: the relation between state, regime and law and different variants of legal order in democratic and autocratic regimes. This creates a theoretical basis to gain more conceptual and analytical clarity in the complex realm of the state-regime-nexus.

This article will try to uncover the stance which the early Christian Church held on the legal system of the Roman Empire, in an attempt to reconstruct a stance which could apply to legal systems in general. The sources which we drew upon while writing this paper were primarily those from the New Testament, beginning with the Four Gospels and continuing with the Acts of the Apostoles and the Epistoles, and, secondarily, the works of the Holy Fathers and different Martyrologies through which we reconstructed the manner in which the Christian faith was demonstrated during the ages of persecutions. The article tries to highlight a common stance which can be identified in all these sources and goes on to elaborate how it relates to legal order in general.

This article argues that the conceptions of natural rights in Hobbes’s theory and of economic, social and cultural rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have three common features that serve to justify the thesis that a satisfactory order of coexistence cannot be achieved without extensive state power. Both conceptions identify rights with interests whose satisfaction is considered paramount. Both perspectives see the state as the shaper of the legal order that rights do not create. Finally, both see the state as the entity that must monopolize the management of individual interests represented in rights. This article suggests that these findings are paradoxical when confronted with the main motivation behind the drafting of the Declaration.

The Influence of Pestalozzian Theories on the Theory and Practice of Josiah Warren's Philosophy of Education – The Genesis of the System Josiah Warren is portrayed as the father of American individualist anarchism and the first American anarchist. This paper investigates his contribution to the development of educational theories and his educational practices, since for Warren, as many anarchists, education is the main path to create a new society. Warren’s educational theories and experiments originated mainly from his stay in New Harmony between 1825 and 1827, where he encountered innovative method of teaching that nurtured children’s independence, invented by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Therefore, the aim of this text is to trace how Warren’s philosophy of education was shaped to become an essential element of his theory of stateless political and legal order and how Warren combined concepts of extreme individualism with his economic theories, such as equitable commerce and cost the limit of price. The knowledge of Warren’s New Harmony experience where he encountered William Maclure and Pestalozzian social reformers will enable the reader to better understand the framework of his own concept of education that he practiced at the Spring Hill School in Ohio.