Wacław Uruszczak

Laudation of the ceremony renewal of Professor Stanislaw Grodziski’s doctorate after fifty years (Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Hall College Maius, April 11, 2011)

Apart from the Constitution of May 3, the achievement of the Four-Year Sejm, or the Great Sejm of 1788–1792 included a group of laws which, together with the Constitution, were to form the principal framework of the legal system of the reformed Republic. These laws concerned the legal situation of the townspeople, the range of the direct democracy (the law on sejmiki, or local parliaments), the functioning of the Sejm, the relation between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (uniform state), the administration of justice, the army, the police, and the tax system. The outbreak of the Polish-Russian war caused the suspension of the Sejm proceedings, and the King’s joining the Targowica Confederation, as well as the subsequent defeat, squandered the legislative efforts of the Great Sejm and its attempt at a general reform of the political system and law of Poland

On the 13th of February 2006 there took place in Cracow the ceremony of burying Professor Stanisław Płaza, an outstanding historian of Polish law, professor of the Jagiellonian University, responsible for educating many generations of lawyers. Professor Płaza was born on the 8th of November 1927 in the peasant family in Jarosławice, in the eastern marches. Upon the outbreak of World War II he and his family were deported to Siberia by the Soviet authorities. He returned to Poland in 1945 and in 1949 he passed his high school finals in the Jan Sobieski Memorial Secondary School in Cracow. In 1954 he graduated from the Law Faculty of the Jagiellonian University. Later, for some time he was employed in the State Archive, which was a significant  experience in his career. Since 1957 he was permanently bound with the University. Among his rich scholarly achievements there is detectable the research concerned with the peasant law. In this area he published valuable court record books. He laid a considerable emphasis on the research relating to the constitutional system of the 16th and 17th century Poland. He investigated inter alia the legal issues of interregna and nobiliary Seymiks. Since he was a determined advocate of comparative research he compiled a multivolumed synthesis of Polish legal history as set against the background of European developments. He was famous for his research of source-book and bibliography type. He did his teaching with enormous energy and sympathy. He supervised a considerable number of LLM and LLD alumni. He was professionally active until the end of his days. He will stay in our hearts as an individual distinguished by his enormous knowledge, great heart, kindness and sympathy.

The text presented below is an illustration of the history of the editing of legal historical sources in Poland. a special research team for planning the editing of legal sources was assembled by the Committee of Legal Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The head of the team, Dr. Adam Vetulani, worked out a complex program for the editing of sources. The sources had been classified into various categories: land law, rural law, municipal law, and legal acts from the first part of the 19th century. Dr. Vetulani presented five main tasks in particular: 1) continuation of the editing of Corpus Iuris Polonici (the most important edition; includes fundamental legislative and governmental acts from the Middle Ages and the early modern period); 2) continuation of the editing of medieval Statutes of Casimir the Great; 3) continuation of the editing of the records of rural courts, 4) the editing of municipal legal acts; 5) the editing of legal acts from the beginning of the 19th century, i.e. from the advent of capitalism in Polish territory. The article published in this issue of “Cracow Studies of Constitutional and Legal History” (W. Uruszczak, M. Mikuła, Les editions des sources historiques et juridiques en tant que bien culturel national polonais) shows how many plans have been fulfilled. The work also included information on the rules used for editing the Statutes of Casimir the Great. The text of his presentation is a typescript and is kept at the Chair of Polish Legal History at the Jagiellonian University.

The article is devoted to three projects focused on establishing international organizations whose aim was to bring about a common peace in Europe. The first of them was worked out at the court of the King of Bohemia, George of Podiebrad, most probably in 1462; the second is mentioned in the treatise authored by French monk Émeric Crucé, andedited in 1623, under the telling title Le Nouveau Cynée; the third, on the other hand, is Grand Dessein,described in the Memoiresof Duke of Sully Maximilien de Béthune, a minister of Henry IV, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1638. The authors of the present study propose to take a new look at the projects under analysis, perceiving in them an attempt to find a remedy for the problem of wars of religion. Hence, the first of them is shown in the context of the Hussite Wars in Bohemia, whereas the other two are shown in that of the Huguenot Wars in France. The thesis is accepted in the article that George of Podiebrad’s project was primarily meant to be an answer to the current political problems of the day which the “Hussite King” was confronted with. The legal solutions included in the project could – as it seems – offer the Bohemian monarch a handy tool facilitating prevention of both a possible mutiny raised by the internal Catholic opposition, and an attack from outside, which, as a result of Pius II’s repealing of the Compactataand George’s refusal to accept the conditions of agreement proposed by the Holy See, could not be excluded. The acceptance of the thesis of political motives behind the propositions offered by the “Hussite King” does not belittle the value of the very project itself, which, in the history of European political and legal thought, was undoubtedly of paramount importance. Of the three peace plans presented here it is only the project put forward by George of Podiebrad that was invested with legal norms, constituting a ready project of an international contract. It distinguished itself against the other projects with its detailed elaboration and the complexity of the proposed solutions. Moreover, as the only one that was well-known at European courts, it became the subject of diplomatic negotiations which raised considerable interest also among its opponents. The latter were led by the papacy, fighting it, as it eventually turned out, with success. Both George of Podiebrad’s project and the Count of Sully’s proposal took into account the establishment of international organisations of regional character which would associate exclusively Christian states, regarding the fight against the Ottoman Empire as one of the more significant goals of their existence. Only the project by Crucé, which – contrary to the other two was written not by a politician, but by a thinker – assumed bringing peace in a universal dimension, including all the sovereign states of the world. The innovatory approach of Crucé’s proposition consisted in acknowledging as the fundamental one the idea of expected binding the members of the projected organisation by freedom of trade exchange which would be guaranteed in the global dimension”. For the authors of all the aforementioned peace plans the institutional factors uniting the states associated in the organizations to be established were to be commonwealth organs, among which a particular place was to be assigned to organs capable of settling conflicts between states. They can be considered to be a prototype of a contemporary international judiciary. The projects in question were founded on the principle of formal equality of sovereign states, which was accepted as the basis of international relations in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Furthermore, they introduced the principles of renouncing war and accepting the peaceful settlement of conflicts in mutual relations, and of striving for the creation of a system of collective safety. In this way they evidently went beyond the canons of the epochs in which they were created, and some of the ideas lying at their foundations did not materialize until the 20^th century.

The present paper was written as early as 1992 on occasion of the first anniversary of adoption of the Statute on income tax which was designed to be collected from natural persons. It was on occasion of discussion referring to the principles of tax law that the present paper recalled the tax-related slogans at one time formulated by Adam Smith. These slogans make up the canon of fiscal theory accepted by the outstanding Polish experts on the problem, inter alia by Fryderyk Skarbek, Stanisław Głąbiński, Adam Krzyżanowski or Henryk Radziszewski. In the context of these slogans the solutions of the Statute of 1991 were subjected to criticism. The problem is that the creators of the Statute, in its detailed solutions, did not show full respect to the principles of justice ad equality that laid the foundations of social order. The analysis of the aforementioned detailed statutory solutions should help the legislator to arrive at the reflection that the fiscal difficulties experienced by the state cannot be mechanically regulated by burdening the poorest in the some way as the rich are burdened.

The sources of legal history illustrate the functioning of state structure and the society à trawers les âges. They are doubtless cultural heritage and value. One can view them through prism that is: 1) historical; 2) cognitive; 3) cultural. It is worthwhile to note that a well-prepared edition of the sources of that type facilitates smuggling their cognitive and cultural values. The editing of the sources cannot be replaced by a digitalization of the archives. Of course, the digitalization is needed (since it provides better protection of the archives than the microfilms do, and facilitates the access to the source material). However it cannot replace the function of source editing. The latter, in fact guarantees their the cognitive and cultural aspects of the source material will be brought to light. When edited, the sources material is not only the tool, it turns also into a cultural value. The first Polish editions of sources of legal history were prepared in the 18th century. These were: Volumina Legum (a collection of parliamentary acts), and the edition of international treaties compiled by Maciej Dogiel. The material they contained was still in use in legal practice of the 18th century. In the 19th century the growth of interests in the Poland’s past was stimulative of further editions of sources. They were published in several series. Thus Antoni Zygmunt Helcel established a series Starodawne prawa polskiego pomniki while the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences printed Archiwum komisji prawniczej. Both series continued publishing the main legal acts and also those illustrative of legal practice from the 13th through 18th centuries. There were also some sources printed beyond the scope of these two series. The efforts of A.Z. Helcel, R. Hube, B. Ulanowski, F. Piekosiński, M. Bobrzyński, S. Kutrzeba and O. Balzer in source exploring were continued after World War II. Those engaged in this work were above all the researchers from Kraków, Warszawa, Poznań. The second series of Starodawne prawa polskiego pomniki was due to the initiative of the Polish Academy of Science, its editor-in-chief being professor Adam Vetulani. Following 1989 it is in the Chair of Polish Legal History at the Jagiellonian University that the task of source editing is continued. It has been for 15 years now that Professor Stanisław Grodziski and his co-workers are engaged in publishing Volumina Constitutionum which is a modern version of the edition of the parliamentary acts of the old-Polish nobiliary Republic. In this millieu it was also Ludwik Łysiak and Karin Nilsen von Stryk who were responsible for publishing the court records illustrative of the cases between 15th through 16th centuries. Professor Wacław Uruszczak and his collaborators were, in their turn, busy editing criminal court records between 16th through 18th centuries.
 

In church law, the union of churches (unio ecclesiarum) concerned the merger of two and more dioceses under the same bishop. In the Middle Ages, canonists were already pointing to three types of union: 1) aeque principalis; 2) unio per subiectionem, when one of the churches was subject to the other and thus the episcopal dignity remained only in that one, and finally, the third kind, called 3) unio per extinctionem, when two particular churches, usually dioceses, were merged into a single new one. The canonical achievements in the field of union of churches and benefices were collected and summarized, among others, in the treatise De unionibus ecclesiarum atque beneficiorum by Nicolaus Thilen, and in the work of Anaclet Reiffenstuel entitled Ius canonicum universum. The three types of union of churches and benefices presented above, distinguished by their mergers, were adopted into the Code of Canon Law of 1917 (canons 1419 and 1420). The 450th anniversary of the union concluded on July 1, 1569 in Lublin was celebrated in 2019. As a result of this union the Kingdom of Poland, called the Crown, merged with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The canonical models of the union of churches and benefices, developed in medieval canon law, are important for a closer description of the essence of this relationship, starting with the first of them, i.e. the union concluded in 1385 in Krevo. The political relationships established between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania largely corresponded to the three canonical models of the church union indicated above, i.e. unio aeque principalis (1385), unio per subiectionem (1413) and unio per extinctionem seu translationem (1569).