Judiciary under the charges. In response to Professor Stanisław Gołąb’s publication

The article of the Editor of ‘The Voice of Law’ was written in response to Stanisław Gołąb’s piece published above. It is a kind of commentary on Gołąb’s article. With his great literary pen, Anzelm Lutwak points to the problems of the justice system in the interwar Poland, juxtaposing ideals with the reality. The author examines the crisis of the Polish judiciary from a broader perspective. He indicates that such a crisis occurs in many places, including Germany (referring to the valuable article entitled ‘Crisis in the German administration of justice’ by the former First Minister of Justice of the Weimar Republic, Otto Landsberg, published in ‘The Voice of Law’, 1926 , No. 7-8, pp. 285-289). German sources stemmed from the fact that in the German republic the judges had anti-liberation and anti-democratic views rooted in the Second Reich, and the Republic did nothing to change the judiciary after the fall of the authoritarian monarchy, considering that an oath on the Constitution of the Republic was sufficient. Meanwhile, it turned out that it was not enough, the evidence of which was already visible at the end of the 1920s, and became obvious during the times of the Third Reich.

Analyzing the condition of the Polish judiciary, Editor Lutwak indicates that its most pressing problem is the deficit of appointed judges. He draws attention to the lack of adequate education of candidates for the judges in Poland, and similar gaps in the subsequent education of the judges themselves, especially in relation to professional ethics. He also draws attention to the fact that the judiciary and its special function are underestimated. Much of this result from the shortcomings of the professional environment itself. According to the author, professional judges are and will be perceived as non-civic by the society. He adds: “this image can be refuted only by the judges with an internal vocation – those who know how to interact with the whole society, on the civic level, - who know how to do it, yet not in the form of irritable and passionate anti-satirists or inexorable avengers of law and authority, but in the form of good and enlightened spirits of the social peace”.

The text features only minimally modernized spelling and punctuation.

Keywords: Anzelm Lutwak, The Second Republic of Poland, judiciary, justice, judicial reforms.