The article focuses on the problem of using the legal heritage based on the example of the May Third Constitution. This issue is considered in relation to two selected moments in the history of the Congress Kingdom of Poland – 1814/1815 and 1831. What connects them, and at the same time makes them unique periods in the political and constitutional history of Polish territories under the partitions, is the relative freedom the Polish elites had in their right to decide on the constitutional foundations of their own statehood. In 1814/1815, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski was granted the emperor’s consent to prepare a draft which, after corrections, became the basis of the Constitutional Act granted by Alexander I. Similarly in 1831, after the dethronement of Tsar Nicholas I, the insurgent elites were free to embark on an unfettered constitutional debate on the systemic reform of the state. Both in 1814/1815 and in 1831, Polish political and intellectual elites faced a dilemma as to whether the May Third Constitution could serve mainly as a monument and symbol of Polish history, or whether it still had the potential to be directly applied; and if so, then to what extent and under what conditions. The publication is devoted to exploring answers to these questions.

The idea of granting the Simple Police Courts the authority to arrest dates back to the times of the Duchy of Warsaw, when in response to the postulates published in penitentiary journals, an attempt was made to create a more extensive system of detention centers. Precise definition of the role of these units in the penitentiary system of the Kingdom of Poland is not easy, due to terminological and practical problems, in contrast with detention and police arrests. Initially, these centers were intended for detainees under an elementary investigation. Although this was their basic role throughout the existence of the Kingdom of Poland, over the years, either by decisions of governmental bodies, or as a result of developed practice, they began to perform additional functions. First of all, people sentenced to short-term imprisonment were allowed to be placed in detention facilities, which was mainly due to the need to reduce both costs and the overcrowding of domestic prisons. From 1837, people arrested or sentenced during transport were placed in detention centers, due to the lack of suitable premises for organizing separate transport stations. The difficult reality faced by lower-level administrative authorities meant that, despite the lack of appropriate regulations, persons subject to extradition or hiding from the military census, and even insolvent debtors, were placed in detention.

The Springtime of Nations in Germany is mostly associated with the views of various moderate liber- als, who played leading roles during these revolutionary events. The case is different when it comes to the members of the most radical wing within the liberal movement, the so called “democrats”. Their ideas are described far less frequently. The article presented analyzes the idea of human rights in the views of Gustav Struve – one of the most important figures in the German democratic movement. During the German Springtime of Nations, the notion of human rights was one of the most frequently discussed but also variably understood problems. Struve’s views regarding this question refer not only to the idea of human rights, they also form a kind of political manifesto including solutions for various problems encountered by average citizens along with suggestions concerning an equitable structure of thesocial order. These postulates were revolutionary and radical, but often incoherent. Hence they fit well into the characteristics of the whole German democratic movement in the first half of the 19th century, which was seen as an unpopular, unsystematic, eclectic, and immature phenomenon. The ar- ticle first describes Struve’s life in the context of various events of the German Springtime of Nations. Subsequently, it analyzes the notion of the human being, his functioning in the social community, and the definition of his rights. The article ends with an analysis of the material content of the concept of human rights in the views of the described German radical.

The paper deals with two different political interpretations of presidential power under the Third and Fifth French Republics, which clearly changed the position of the head of state in relation to the letter of constitutional acts that were in force at the time. Both of these interpretations were im- posed by the presidents in office in the first years after the proper structures of the system of gov- ernment had been established. The former (commonly known as the “Grévy constitution”) led to the weakening of presidential power, and the latter (described as the “de Gaulle constitution”) to its strengthening. Particular attention is thus paid to the formation of such particular unwritten norms of constitutional law in rationalized and non-rationalized parliamentary systems. In both cases, their basic feature turned out to be the ability to significantly modify the parliamentary system of gov- ernment. In the last part of the paper, the stability and durability of the above-mentioned political interpretations of the aforementioned constitutions are discussed. It is indicated that in both cases there were attempts to challenge these non-codified standards. Although the causes of such actions were different from each other, neither brought any meaningful success.

In his monumental non-fiction book, The Gulag Archipelago, Nobel Prize winning author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn illustrates real events in Soviet labor camps in literary form. The depiction of EVIL is shocking. The totalitarian Soviet regime subjected millions of people to a horrific fate. As is gener- ally well-known, Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Soviet concentration camp. Mass terror was the essence of Soviet totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn included a lecture on Soviet criminal law in his book, stressing the importance of Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union in authorizing this terrorism. Solzhenitsyn himself was not a lawyer. However, his conclusions were very accurate. Article 58 of the Criminal Code, which consisted of seventeen paragraphs, defined “counter-revolutionary offenses”. They were obviously punished most rticle 58 became a weapon of terror for the Soviet authorities, who used it convict millions of innocent people.

One of the most important tasks facing the Codification Commission established in 1919 was to regulate the issue of matrimonial property law. The work of the Commission on that issue, which in essence started with its inauguration, was terminated abruptly in 1920. After a thirteen-year hiatus, the debate resumed and resulted in the draft matrimonial property law of 1937, which was adopted on its first reading by the sub-commission on matrimonial property law. The second reading started on 1 April 1938, however, the effects of the work of the sub-commission were previously unknown. This historical source edition sheds a completely new light on that issue. It contains yet unknown draft regulations (from Art. 1 to Art. 99 of the draft) adopted on second reading of the matrimonial property law in 1938–1939. The publication of this source will therefore be of great importance in the context of further research on the history of family law in interwar Poland.