Tomasz Kucharski

Rules of Criminal Court Record Archival Appraisal in the Provisions on the Court Records Storage and Disposal from 1937. On the Genesis and Results of Interwar Regulation on Determining the Value of the Polish Common Court Documentation

An article is devoted to what is a crucial problem for every historian of the 19th and 20th centuries – historical rules of archival appraisal, that is, the determination as to which records that were created for practical reasons and current activities of state institutions in the past, should be protected permanently because of their historical value. The author focuses on criminal court records in light of the Polish interwar rules enacted by the Justice Minister in 1937. The mentioned regulation was the first on an analyzed matter in Polish legal tradition. It set the essential criteria and mechanisms for court records archival appraisal, also adopted in later rules on this topic from 1975, 1989, and 2004 (the latest remains in force to the present). Beyond this the author tries to explain why, in 1937, the Polish Ministry established rules that intended to permanently protect only a few groups of criminal court records as being historically valuable. He mainly analyzes the primary regulation draft from January of 1937, which intended to cover more groups of criminal court records for permanent archival protection. The paper tries to establish the reasons as to why those propositions were rejected. In the end, the author purposes to set in motion a discussion of the consequences that resulted from rules adopted in 1937 for current legal-historical or historical-criminological research.

Court Case Files and Court Judgments from the Second Republic of Poland as a Historical Source: Key Archival and Methodological Issues in an Example of Research on Family fideicommissa

The article is the result of archival research, executed under the leadership of Prof. Zbigniew Naworski within the framework of an academic project financed by the National Science Centre (the OPUS 14 program). The author tries to show basic rules and problems associated with research on civil court case files in Polish archives from the interwar period. The starting points for his considerations are the history of Polish archival law on the criteria for the assessment of the archival value of court files, and the consequences of adopting them into practice. Besides that, he tries to emphasize how essential the archival finding aids are for this type of research, as well as how their absence is a key issue to the effectiveness of archival research. Those are crucial factors, especially when a legal historian needs to work on numerous, diffused, and not always organized archival collections. Unfortunately, this is an issue with interwar court case files. The author suggests how the archival staff might improve the shaping of the archival inventories on court case files, to make them more accessible and easier to work with. He also tries to demonstrate the advantages of creating other archival aids on this type of source material –especially archival descriptive inventories and indexes which are very helpful for preliminary research. In the end, the author shares his experiences of his attempts to reconstruct or regain lost court case files using other archival collections of sources of interwar family archives or barristers files.

*Artykuł został przygotowany w toku realizacji projektu badawczego finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki w programie OPUS 14 (nr 2017/27/B/HS5/02679) zatytułowanego Fideikomisy familijne w Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej w świetle orzecznictwa sądów cywilnych. Dzieje funkcjonowania feudalnej instytucji prawnej w obrocie prawnym państwa nowoczesnego. Tekst ma charakter historycznoprawny, wykorzystuje jednak i silnie nawiązuje do terminologii i metod badawczych archiwistyki. W konsekwencji w dalszym toku wywodu będęużywałw skrótowej formie standardowych skrótów używanych w nauce i praktyce archiwalnej.

“This General Diet Has Begun Without a Beginning and Has Ended without an end”. So-called ‘Pacification’ General Diet in 1698 and its Meaning in the Context of liberum veto Evolution

The article presented is devoted to an interesting episode from the legal and political history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the seventeenth century – the “breaking up” of the General Diet in 1698 by liberum veto. This particular session of the General Diet was summoned by the newly-elected king – August II, for the ‘pacification’ of the nation and the legitimization of his reign against the opposition that had gathered around the archbishop of Gniezno – Cardinal Michał Radziejowski in Łowicz. The Diet failed to satisfy the king’s expectations. Poor attendance by envoys and senators, as well as the negative attitude of the Lithuanian delegation, caused a brief ‘breaking up’ of the Diet.

The author of the paper tries to show this episode, not as a political, but as a legal phenomenon, and also as an underestimated precedent in the history of old-Polish ‘deliberative’ democracy. He points out the insufficiency of previously known procedures of negotiation with envoys announcing their vetoes. He also emphasizes that the contradiction of the Lithuanian envoys was completely irrational, and that the acceptance shown for their demands was commonly considered to be obviously illegal. Besides this, the envoys were strictly obliged to ‘break up’ the Diet, which was clearly against the essence of the parliamentary mandate. However, this was not enough to reject contradiction. From this very moment any attempt to limit or restrain liberum veto was not possible.