From Editors [No. 6]

This is already the 200th issue of “The Voice of Law”, and its 125th volume at the same time!

Since the reissue of the journal in 2018, we continue to emphasize our attachment to the tradition of a pre-war legal journal founded, edited and published in Lwów (now Lviv) by Dr. Anselm Lutwak. We decided to count all issues of the journal published before the war, bearing in mind that no library has a complete set. The search allowed us to complete an entire edition of the journal, and thus we can conclude that before World War II, Dr. Lutwak published and distributed 194 issues of “The Voice of Law” in 120 volumes. Perhaps in 1939 there was still a summer issue in print, but no copy has survived. The last known issue is No. 3-5/1939. Against this backdrop, we can assume that the number 6 of “The Voice of Law” (after the title was re-issued) is also number 200 when counted from 1924. Numbering the volumes, in turn, this is the 125^th volume of the journal entitled “The Voice of Law”.

This is already an obligation. Also because of this special jubilee, we have enriched this issue more than usual with the FONTES section, that is with reprints of valuable studies from before 1939, including two from “The Voice of Law”.

This time, the main theme of the issue is a topic that has been discussed in Poland and Europe for several years now – the appointment of the judiciary. The topic is considered in two papers in the OPERA sections, i.e. in an article by Dr. Mariusz Mohyluk, who discusses preparatory works on the system of common courts conducted under the auspices of the Codification Commission of the Republic of Poland in 1919-1928, and in an article by judge Dr. Grzegorz Borkowski discussing the latest standards regarding the appointment of judges in the light of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union. In addition, this topic is considered in the VOTUM SEPARATUM section that was announced already in the previous issue. The topic is supplemented by four reprints from an interwar period. Two of them – Prof. Eugeniusz Waśkowski’s and advocate Stanisław Car’s – focus on the discussion on the optimal model of appointing judges in draft works on the system of common courts organized by the Polish Codification Commission, and by parliamentary committees between 1923 and 1927. The authors discuss at length the models of selecting judges that were binding in Europe at that time, pointing to their advantages and disadvantages. The next two – Prof. Stanisław Gołąb and Dr. Anzelm Lutwak – are an in-depth reflections on the Polish judiciary at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s.

The OPERA section features a very up-to-date study by advocate Dr. Monika Strus-Wołos on the dangers of mechanisms and solutions introduced at the end of 2020 to the Code of Civil Procedure in Poland, obliging persons using domestic violence to leave a shared apartment and its immediate surroundings or prohibiting being in the vicinity of the apartment. In the same section, we can also find an article by Marta Kosmowska devoted to the issue of liability for damages for issuing an unlawful individual interpretation of tax law.

The issue also includes studies which appear in every issue. Among them is the review of the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court for the period April-August 2020 by Patryk Gacka, which highlights the law that provides victims of judicial mistakes with means of appeal before international criminal tribunals. In addition, the Reader will find there another reprint of the article by Prof. Maurycy Allerhand, this time about the relation of state law to religious law. The next installment of the Lexicon of Jurists and Economists presents the figure and achievements of Aleksander Doliński (1866-1930), the main codifier of commercial law in the Second Polish Republic, also due to the fact that an excellent work entitled “The Austrian law on limited liability companies” from 1908 was reprinted in the inaugural “Library of the Voice of the Law” – a new publishing series of the Allerhand Publishing House.

In the RES GESTAE department, we welcome Prof. Maciej Jońca with an erudite essay entitled Pater semper incertus!, and Dr. Krzysztof Smolana with an article about Karol Bertoni (1876-1967), one of the main creators of the Polish foreign service during the Second Polish Republic and the model of education for diplomacy and consular service. This section also includes the autobiographical text of Prof. Ryszard Szawłowski with a list of his publications. The text was written in 2006 and 2008, and was made available to the Editorial Board by Mrs. Hanna Szawłowska, a spouse of the late Professor Szawłoski. This text corresponds with the richly illustrated personal posthumous memoir of Prof. Szawłowski, an outstanding researcher of the life and achievements of Rafał Lemkin, that may be found in the IN MEMORIAM section. This time, this section contains as many as four obituaries, which also shows how many important scientists, jurists and people of culture died in 2020. We commemorate advocate Andrzej Bąkowski (1927-2020), who devoted most of his professional activity to taking care of attorney’s discipline and ethics, emphasizing the importance of honor, respect and decency in the practice of advocates. We also dedicate our memory to two people who have been extremely important for the research on the history of Lviv (Lwów) and contemporary Polish-Ukrainian relations, the founder and editor of the “Lwów Yearbook” (Rocznik Lwowski) Janusz Wasylkowski (1933-2020) and the founder and editor of the Galicia Courier (Kurier Galicyjski) Mirosław Rowicki (1953-2020).

In the column section, we welcome on board “The Voice of Law” judge Arkadiusz Krupa, who shares his memories and reflections inspired by the songs of “Kult” and the observation of surrounding reality. He is also the author of illustrations for several articles. Advocate Ewa Stawicka, in turn – “in spite of” the winter – shares with us the poetry written before the pandemic in Kuźnica at the Baltic Sea.

The next edition of the short reflections inspired by the graphics on the fourth page of the cover focuses on the content of Albrecht Dürer's brilliant Melancholy I. This unique drawing from 1514 seems to be always up-to-date, always prompting reflection on the condition of the world, humanity, but also of law, justice and the judiciary – not only in the era of the still unbridled pandemic of the SARS CoV-2 virus.

In recent months, we have intensified efforts to ensure the presence of “The Voice of Law” in subsequent indexing databases. Our quarterly was rated very well in the ICI Journals Master List 2019 database. We are in The Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Center for Open Science (CeON), Polish Scientific Bibliography, Scientific Information Portal, and soon also in Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL). Articles from “The Voice of Law” are also indexed in the Google Scholar database. We have also submitted an application to the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH PLUS). We also hope to be included in other scientific databases soon.

For a long time now, our websites have been edited simultaneously in Polish and in English. We inform about the news and more important events through our FB profile. More and more of our publications are being cited in other scholarly sources. Some of them already have several thousand views.

We also welcome new legal scholars and economists to our Program Council. There are already eleven of us – mostly affiliated with foreign universities.

All of this allows us to look to the future with hope, believing that we are creating an open, free legal science journal. We extend our invitation to cooperate with us in the future.