Societas/Communitas


O piśmie

Zespół redakcyjny

Rada programowa

Recenzenci

Deklaracja o wersji pierwotnej

nr 1: Problemy więzi społecznej
nr 2: Media
nr 3: Socjologia wiedzy
nr 4 - 5: Antropologia; Socjologia
nr 6: Kobiety, mężczyźni, płeć
nr 7: Sociology of Law
nr 8: Polityki pamięci
nr 9: W kierunku społeczeństwa sieciowego
nr 10: Język propagandy a kreacje rzeczywistości
nr 11: Antropologia polityczna
nr 12: Sociology of Law II
nr 13: Kobiety, migracja i praca
nr 14: Socjologia emocji
nr 15: Sociology of Law III: History and Development
nr 16: Pedagogizacja życia społecznego
nr 17: Opis obyczajów na początku XXI wieku
nr 18-1: Nowa młodzież w nowym świecie
nr 18-2: Special Issue. In Memoriam Aldona Jawłowska
nr 19-20: Małe ojczyzny
nr 21: Małżeństwo i rodzina w ponowoczesności
nr 22: Morality, Law and Ethos. Maria Ossowska (1896-1974) - In Memoriam

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Cały numer (pdf)
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Table of contents
Abstracts

Od redakcji

Sociology of law in Poland began in the 1930s under the influence of the teaching of Leon Petrażycki, who came to the resurrected Poland escaping from the Bolshevik Revolution and received the Chair in Sociology at the Faculty of Law, University of Warsaw. From the beginning there was thus the tension between this discipline and sociology which appeared in Poland in its empirically oriented shape under the influence of Florian Znaniecki who travelled between the United States and Poznań, where he had his Chair in Sociology and from where he developed the Polish Institute of Sociology, while the first generation of Petrażycki's Polish pupils were concerned with the socio-psychological reinterpretation of classical jurisprudence issues such as legal interpretation. These two orientations survived World War II but were suppressed by the imposed official Marxist- Leninist doctrine. They were combined by the scholar of the next, postwar generation Adam Podgórecki, who after being educated in the Petrażyckian tradition went to the United States, where after the end of Stalinism in the late 1950s many young Polish scholars were invited, and returned with fresh and first-hand knowledge of American sociology. In 1963 the first book titled Sociology of Law was published in Polish by Podgórecki, who developed around him group of young scholars and organized multi-sided research on sociological aspects of law. One aspect which was firmly stressed by Adam Podgórecki was the need to secure the academic development through the creation of institutional structures. He helped to set up the new Institute at the University of Warsaw which he proposed to call the Institute of Sociotechnics (theory of rational social action was another of his main topics also inherited from Petreżycki and enriched by Podgórecki himself) but due to tactical necessities became the Institute of Social Prevention and Resocialization. He was forcibly transferred to another Institute by the Rector of the Universty of Warsaw acting on directions from the ruling communist party officials in 1972, and this led to his exile abroad. After Poland regained independence in 1989 the Institute split into two. In both halves his disciples continued to develop the interest in sociology of law implanted by their teacher. In the Institute of Applied Social Sciences this takes the form of the Chair in Sociology and Anthropology of Custom and Law which the guest editor of this issue happens to hold. The years of anniversaries gave the occasion for some sessions and publication with provided material for the present issue. It so happened that the publication of the volume marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the said Chair. A discussion of the impact of Leon Petrażycki on the social sciences and law took place during the congress held in 2007 in Berlin jointly by the Law and Society Association and the Research Committee of Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association. I personally chaired the session. Interest in Petrażycki was wide, extending from philosophy to practical politics, so the discussion touches various aspects where his legacy seems to be of value still today. It was my intention not only to secure the participation of scholars from various national traditions but also from various generations as well. Thus, experienced academics took part as well as representatives of the youngest generations. It seems that his legacy is cherished though not necessarily acknowledged. As Carol Weisbrod points out, there were obvious mishaps such as lack of proper marketing and proper editing of Petrażycki's works in English. Three other contributions made in Berlin (M. Fuszara, E. Fittipaldi and J. Kurczewski) point to different aspects of Petrażycki's contribution: his concept of rights and of politics of women's rights in particular; his theory of civil law closely related to economics; and his concept of law that made room for legal pluralism at the beginning of the 20th century and paved the way for the anthropology of law of Bronis³aw Malinowski. The debate ends with the paper that my undergraduate student A. Ni¿yñska happened to write when asked to comment on a piece of what is called law-and-critical literary studies, putting the value of Petrażycki's legacy in yet another context. The five articles that follow deal with sociology of law as well. The article by Masaki Abe brings us closer to the empirical side of social research on law and deals with one of the main issues that was always (for Petrażycki too) at the core of sociology of law, that is, dealing with disputes. It was Petrażycki who remarked that the disputes that arrive before official courts are just the tip of the iceberg and that the remaining ones are settled in their own ways. To this Ma³gorzata Fuszara and Jacek Kurczewski also refer, describing in their joint paper the effects of the political transition from communism to the democratic legal state on dispute and dispute management practices. Grzegorz Makowski comments critically the recent debate on corruption in post-1989 Poland. In the fourth article, Vittorio Olgiati, one of the leading European sociologists of law today, takes up the issue of legal pluralism. In fact, that could have been an homage to Petrażycki also, as who else at the beginning of 20th century was more fiercely struggling for the recognition of the co-existence of a multiplicity of legal orders from the small closed legal worlds of the children's rooms to the global world of international law which continued to develop despite lack of support by organized state power and courts. Olgiati was influenced by the teachings of Adam Podgórecki who also dealt with legal pluralism as the basic approach in his sociology of law, since he held that it ought to be studied as an aspect of the unofficial but vivid legal life we all are immersed in. The article by Piers Pigou, the historian of the South African truth and reconciliation process is of another character. It comes from another session at the Berlin meeting which I happened to chair, that is, on justice in periods of transformation. While the articles dealing with Central and Eastern Europe had been published in a recent issue of the Polish Sociological Review (Marek Safjan and Susanne Karstedt plus Adriana Mica) this is the sincere report on what constitutes the most brave attempt by law to deal with the atrocities of the 20th century's past. Those who lived through that century know that law did not help to prevent its horrors. The Holocaust, the Gulag, Apartheid, total war, mass exterminations and ethnic cleansing – all that happened. The role of law is rather to help to heal the wounds, and this is a sufficiently difficult task to be concerned with. Petrażycki would comfort us not with the sentimental promise that such outbursts of hatred and cold engineering of terror someday will end forever but with the observation that there is a slow evolution in human habits, that though crimes of the past do not disappear, they tend more to be hidden, and moreover they are condemned and sometimes even punished and that new standards, for instance, of interrogation, slowly, sometimes in convulsions, are emerging. He would also wisely add that one could not expect the new legal standards to be practiced so long as our standards of emotions on which the practice is based have not evolved. The third part of the issue contains several contributions by younger Polish scholars, graduates or doctoral students who at our Institute do work in developing various elements in sociology of law as an independent and self-sustaining area of social scientific interest. This is not the only place in Poland where such research is done but the amount of the work done there makes it a significant center and it is up to the readers to judge whether this work is of wider interest. Only recently have we begun to learn that true sociology of law must cease to be national. For centuries law was national, the official law being the attribute of sovereignty. To escape from such enclosures is easier to be done for the sociologist than for the lawyer and one of the tasks of sociology of law is to help to accelerate the process of de-nationalization of legal thinking further. I thought it appropriate that the book reviews as well should focus on sociology of law, so some books, most of them unavailable in English that deal with the field are reviewed or discussed, mostly by Polish contributors. Jacek Kurczewski

Antropologia

Filozofia

Polityka

społeczna

Psychologia

Socjologia