Legal History in Poland; Research and Instruction ical theory, rather than fromthe elemental desire to preserve their ancient privilegies. However, there is an obvious connection. By European standards, the Republic provides an instance of grossly retarded development. To observers in the age of Enlightenment, Polish attitudes were reminiscent of those of savage medieval barons. Yet it must not be forgotten that modern Anglo-Saxon democracy has grown from an essentially conservative positions,which still sees the medieval traditions of Magna Carta as relevant to the needs of today”.'5 315 IV. of course legal history as practiced in the Polish Universities is not limited only to the historical studies of Polish law and Polish constitution. It also covers a large niveau of the history of foreign lawand foreign constitutionalism. In the past there were certain factors formative or stimulative of the development of this branch of legal studies. In the early 20''^ century just before Poland, following World war I, reappeared on the map of Europe legal historians were naturally involved in the fervent discussion having the legal institutions of partitioning powers as its subject matter. Which of these institutions should be rejected and which deserved being preserved and for what reasons, was the urgent question. But in fact the study of foreign devices was no novelty among the Poles. At the final decades of the 18^*’ century the eminent thinkers, like StanislawKonarski, arrived at a remarkably deep insight into the British constitutional system. The goal that they pursued in this case was to implant in the minds of the Polish reformers certain mechanisms already outlined in the British Parliamentarism. They believed that the Polish system, when provided with foreign borrowings, might cease to scroop, and the sovereignty of the Republic could be saved. Hence, as has already been mentioned earlier, the Constitution adopted in dramatic circumstances of 3 May 1791, defined the position of the King as the one who ‘can do no wrong’ since all his executive acts had to be signed by the respective ministers. The latter took full responsibility for what they endorsed and could be both impeached as well as eliminated through vote of no confidence if the majority of the lower House, by means of two thirds of secret vote, demanded that. By that time this early vote of no confidence, evidently borrowed from the British system, was an absolute novelty in Continental Europe. Of course, seperation of powers that this Constitution also promoted was no novelty in the Commonwealth which, with its limited monarch whose status was boiled down to the position of a president for life rather, kept to this idea already for a fewcenturies. Ibidem, p. 371.
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