Legal History in Poland: Research and Instruction 317 of Roman law research in Poland from La sitnazione delle ricerche romanistiche in Polonia (Index Quaderni camerati di studi romani. International Survey of Roman law 12, 1983-84, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane) by Janusz Sondel, another Cracow Romanist. Polish Canon law research may be known by French and German readers thanks to Adam Vetulani’s production. The volume of his valuable papers has recently been published in the collected studies series entitled Sur Gratien ct les DcaLtales, 1990, and Institutions de LEglise et canonistes au Moyen Age, De Strasbourg a Cracovie, 1991 (both volumes were edited bv Waclaw Uruszczak and appeared in Variorum, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd). To complete my brief report I would emphasize two points: the Communist period in Poland was responsible for endangering the research in legal history with considerable deformities. At that time it was demanded that historical analysis be subject to the dominant class struggle dogmatic assumptions. In the research, the emphasis was laid on the study of social phenomena and their reflection in the law of the past. While trying to partly comply with this tendency, Polish legal historians focused on the studies that had larger social tint, like details of the peasant lawas applied in the village courts. Aseries of source books illustrative of this law came out. Sc)me part of the historians tried to leave the slippery ground by studying the details of old criminal and civil law procedures or Institutions of substantial civil and criminal law. In general these attempts proved benefitial because previously the law to which lower strata of the society were subject, or the court-applied law, were less frequently studied.'^ Those legal historians who still continued to focus on constitutional law preferred to go deeply into the subtleties of parliamentary mechanisms of the past. Another point that might be interesting particularly for the German legal historians is the specific research line follc»wed recently in Poland mostly by Ludwik Lysiak who commenced a detailed study of court-applied German law as binding in the cities of medieval Poland and those of the subsequent Commonwealth. Beginning with the 13''^ century a lot of Polish towns, both old and new, received an autonomous jurisdictional status. They used to model their law on the patterns applied in the eminent German cities such as for instance Magdeburg. For them, therefore, the source of lawwas the SaxenSpiegel or the Weiehbild of Magdeburg. As a result, during the period of feudal disintegration in Poland (1 138-1320) and even up to the mid-14t*i century. A part of Polish research on the old Polish procedure may be availablet to the non-Polish reader in: Humanitarian tradition of the Polish a'iniinal procedure. On the history of the torture abolition andfree expression in the Polish a'lminal procedure, ed. by Stanislaw Waltos, Krakow 1983; see also Waclaw Uruszczak Le droit de la procedure en Pologne du XIV^’ siecle, L’ Educazione Giuridica VI, Modelli storici della procedura continentale, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane 1994.
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