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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 Sprzedaż i prenumerata Dla Autorów Kontakt Napisz do nas |
 Do pobrania: 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
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Antropologia Filozofia Polityka społeczna Psychologia Socjologia |