Roman women – priestesses, patrician women, mysterious guardians of the sacred flame of goddess Vesta, admired and respected, sometimes blamed for misfortune of the Eternal City. Vestals identified with the eternity of Rome, the priestesses having a specific, unavailable to other women power. That power gained at the moment of a ritual capture (captio) and responsibilities and privileges resulted from it are the subject matter of this paper. The special attention is paid to the importance of Vestals for Rome and Romans in various historic moments, and to the purifying rituals performed by Vestals on behalf of the Roman state’s fortune. The study presents probable dating and possible causes of the end of the College of the Vestals in Rome.

In connection with the dramatic shortage of residential accommodations in the first years of Polish statehood after the regaining of independence in 1918, the way to guarantee their provision for military personnel (officers and married non-commissioned officers) and civilians (state and local government officials) was a statutory obligation to provide them by means of legal administrative coercion. The aim of this article is to analyse issues relating to the requisitioning of flats, and in particular, to analyse the sources of legislation in this area at that time, and judicial decisions of the administrative court with regard to complaints made to this court in cases concerning these requisitions.

Diseases and the risk of death associated with them i.e. from plagues (epidemics), especially danger­ous as virulence increased, led the legislature to provide in the provisions of the inheritance law for the testator to draw up a will which for its validity had less formal requirements than an ordinary will, but would be in force in the event of the sudden death of the testator. Such a possibility was included by the Austrian legislature in the possibility for such a person to take advantage of the privileged decree of last will, the rules of which are regulated in §§ 597–599 ABGB. According to these rules, in places where there was a plague or similar plagues, the testator could make a will before two people who were at least fourteen years old. At the same time, they did not have to be present due to the risk of contracting a disease. The laconic nature of the conditions enabling the use of a privileged will as defined in ABGB meant that in practice these issues had to be finally resolved by the judicature of the courts.

After World War II, a number of territories that had belonged to Germany before 1945 were incorpo­rated into those of the Polish state. The change of borders resulted in the need to build structures of the Polish judiciary and prosecutor’s offices in these territories. This article is devoted to describing the functioning of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Regional Court in Głogów with its seat in Nowa Sól. The history of this office is an example of how prosecutors’ offices operated in difficult post-war conditions in the recovered territories, as well as of relations between the prosecutors’ offices and other public authorities such as the Citizens’ Militia or the judiciary.

The study was devoted to the legal opinion drawn up in the post-war trial against the German judge Albert Michel on the activities of German courts in Polish territories during the Nazi occupation. The scope of the opinion is broader than it appears from the title – Professor Władysław Wolter covered the entire German occupation including the actual German invasion in 1939. The text of the source was preceded by a discussion in which the circumstances of the opinion were explained, the author’s profile was presented, and its most important theses were characterised. The statements of the opinion were re­lated to other views of the doctrine and jurisprudence, as well as the decisions issued in the Michel case.

“Commons – Jointly-used Goods: Comparative Aspects of the Use of Water Resources” further develops the theory of governing the dwindling resources, based on Professor Elinor Ostrom’s economic theory of Commons, and expands on it on legal science. The monograph highlights the increased effectiveness of bottom-up norms in preventing the complete depletion of the endangered resources while simultaneously satisfying the needs of the local community, if the public authorities decide to respect them. The legal and functional characteristics of those norms aren’t uniform in different legal traditions, which is shown by examples from various legal systems provided by the author. The author also acknowledges that the issue of property and restricting it in the interests of other people was often mentioned in Roman law, especially in arguments between Roman jurists about water easements. The review describes basic theses and their argumentation contained in the monograph and evaluates its substance, form, and the universal character of the referenced problem.

The inspiring monograph of Piotr Alexandrowicz entitled “Canonistic Justification of Freedom of Contract in the Western Legal Tradition” clearly shows that the true creators of freedom of contract were not ancient Roman jurists or emperors, but medieval canonists. Based on Christian moral theology, they built the unique doctrine of obligations without which it is quite difficult to imagine contemporary legal transactions. Their thought was subsequently taken up and further developed by modern thinkers.

The review discusses the latest book on the situation of public finances in Galicia during the period of autonomy (1867–1914). The author, using numerous statistical studies, materials of the Diet of Galicia and Lodomeria, and the National Department as well as academic literature (nineteenth-century and modern), presents Galicia’s place in the Austro-Hungarian tax system and recreates the structure of its budgets, as well as the financial situation of local government, and the basic principles of the social security system. This is all offered against a broad constitutional and political, as well as socio-economic, background. The result of the work is several important research theorems, which significantly enrich knowledge about Galicia.

The review deals with a recently published book authored by John B. Nann and Morris L. Cohen and titled “The Yale Law School Guide to Research in American Legal History”. The modern, digital inclusive, approach to research in legal history presented by the book’s authors, provides a basis for the further comments gathered in the review. The review aims to convince Polish scholars to create a similar tool for young acolytes of legal history.

The: “English Law and Colonial Connections: Histories, Parallels, and Influences conference” was held over the course of two afternoons, on January 26–27, 2020. It was organized by the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Łódź and Northumbria University in Newcastle. The symposium’s goal was to bring together researchers with interests in the history of English law and its influences on other parts of the world, particularly within an imperial context. An additional topic of the conference was the meaning of legacies and continuing influences of the empire and colonial influences of the law back to the Metropole. Nine lectures were delivered over the course of four sessions.