History

On our way ... wrote almost 95 years ago Dr Anzelm Lutwak while establishing "The Voice of the Law" journal.

What else to add?

We publish a preface to the first issue of "The Voice of Law" from 1924. The magazine of the Allerhand Institute refers to the tradition of a legal monthly edited by the advocate Dr Anzelm Lutwak. This tireless and creative jurist, who possessed a rare gift of describing the legal reality, as early as in 1910 set up a journal for the advocates in Lviv and called it "Palestra". But the initiative did not gain sufficient support from the legal community at that time. After regaining the independence by Poland, Dr. Lutwak returned to the idea of ​​a magazine created for and in cooperation with practitioners of law and learned jurists. A few months earlier, however, the name “Palestra” was taken by the Warsaw lawyer Stanisław Tsar – later known as the leading lawyer of Marshal Piłsudski and the Sanation political movement (Sanacja) who instituted the advocate’s monthly in Warsaw at that time. Lutwak, in turn, came up with a broader formula of “The Voice of Law” further strengthened by a quote from Heraclitus of Ephesus: “People must fight for the law, like for the city walls!”.

The journal has become one of the most important, and certainly the boldest legal magazines of interwar Poland. It had an original profile, while the authors included the greatest legal scholars and practitioners of the era. The Editor also took care of reprinting important studies of Western lawyers translated into Polish (for more, see the article on Anzelm Lutwak and his Voice in issue 1/2019).

One of the most active authors of "The Voice of Law" was Prof. Dr. Maurycy Allerhand. Notably, he was the only person to whom Editor Lutwak dedicated an entire special issue of the "The Voice of Law", thereby emphasizing Prof. Allerhand’s importance for the monthly.

In 2009 we set up a legal foundation – the Allerhand Institute – under the patronage of Prof. Maurycy Allerhand. One of the founders of the Institute was Dr. Leszek Allerhand - the grandson of the Institute's patron, who died on 3 April 2018. Other founders include Prof. Grzegorz Domański, Prof. Stanisław Sołtysiński, Michał Bobrzyński and the undersigned.

In the first years, the Institute was a co-publisher of the magazine 'HUK. Quarterly Magazine of Commercial, Bankruptcy and Capital Market Law” founded in 2007 in cooperation with the publishing house C.H. - 'HUK. Quarterly Magazine of Commercial, Bankruptcy and Capital Market Law” and edited by Arkadiusz Radwan. In total, 9 notebooks were published, and they are still valued in the literature. Unfortunately, the magazine was suspended in 2010.

In subsequent years we continued working on creating a permanent magazine. Several collective works and monographs in the "Allerhand's Publishing" were published. Moving with the times, we also launched the Allerhand Working Papers series - publications distributed in free access, facilitating the rapid inclusion in scientific discussions of the results of the latest research of the Institute's employees and persons associated with the Allerhand community. So far, several publications in this series have been produced. Many of them are available in international repositories such as SSRN, ResearchGate or Academia.edu as well. However, it was not until 2018 – when we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of the patron of the Institute (and other important reasons that we should not write about here) – that an initial idea was brought to fruition.

Here we refer specifically to the "Voice of the Law" that was published in 1924-1939, and to "HUK", published in 2007-2010, as well as to numerous other publications by the Allerhand Institute. We have created a legal journal open to all lawyers, in which - we hope - theory and practice, history and the present times as well as law and economics will all meet together.

Allerhand's "The Voice of Law" refers to the best traditions of Lutwak’s “The Voice of Law" and Radwan’ "HUK", draws on the experience of "Palestra" (2005-2018), but proposes its own formula of an open magazine.

Each notebook has several permanent sections. The first one (Opera) contains the most extensive and - in our view - the most important papers, i.e. studies and articles. The next one (Sententiae) features case law reviews of international and domestic courts as well as case comments. The next section includes shorter pieces such as reviews, columns and essays (Miscellaenea). Next, in the Fonetes - Res gestae section historical materials are published. The most important part of it are reprints of selected important studies from Lutwak's "The Voice of Law". In the first issue, for instance, it is Rafał Lemkin’s article from 1933, in which he formulated a postulate to introduce an international convention for the punishment of crimes of barbarism and vandalism. It is in them that the later concept of Genocide has its roots. Each volume concludes with an original lexicon of eminent Polish jurists. It is focused not only on their personal biographies, but also on their scholarly and practical work.