EDITORS INTRODUCTION The present volume includes a series of papers dealing with the main methodological problems of general study of law as discussed in ...

The article attempts to provide a brief account of the ways in which lawyers carry through their arguments concerning some closed moral evaluations or norms and showing how by reference to those norms and evaluations they argue some legal issues as, e.g., the question of the interpretation of legal norms. The author based his reasoning on examples taken from Polish legal literature.

The article presents the ethical conceptions of Czesław Znamierowski, a prominent Polish moral philosopher, professor of general theory of law of University of Poznań. The task of reconstructing Znamierowski’s ideas is rather difficult: his works concerning ethical problems are written with a looseness much unlike thee cautious and priggish style of works presenting the philosophical systems. Moreover, in the course of time his opinions changed in several points.

The application of law means making use of his competence by a subject of law in order to perform in a ”valid” way a definite legal act, basing on a given legal system. The legal act, in a wide meaning of this term, is every act of a conventional character by the adequate performance of which legal obligations of certain subjects, which previously were potentially in force, arise or are actualized. The manner of making use of a granted competence can (...) be unanimously determined, or – and that is of interest in our reasoning – certain limits may be granted to the subject who may decide what use he is willing to make of the awarder competence. (shrink)

The article draws attention to the fact that normative utterances do not describe fragments of the world but due to the fact that they are formulated in certain norm-giving acts they are symptoms of some concurring phenomena. It is quite natural that hearing norms which are proposed by other people we think of them as forms of rational behaviour which are determined by the knowledge and the drives of the people who produce them. This assumption suggests that the fact of (...) enactment of such-and-such a norm is determined by knowledge of the person who proposes the norm. Hence, normative utterances may be considered, without running the risk of a serious fault, symptoms of certain state of affairs or, at least, symptoms of certain conceptions that the norm giver has concerning the states of affairs. (shrink)

This study points to two kinds of relationship between justice and equality: the relationships between the concept of justice and equality, and the relationships between different formulae of justice adopted in social life and the formula of justice based on simple egalitarianism or on the modified formula of egalitarianism. Aristotelian distributive justice postulates identical treatment of similar people, and the controversy arises when it is being decided by virtue of what characteristics similar people are to be treated identically or how (...) differently people should be treated if they possess the relevant characteristic in different degrees. The viable moral doctrines of today accept egalitarian formulae only partially, and for various reasons. The opinions of the society that there is a required dependence of the compound formulae of justice on egalitarian formulae are rather fluid and susceptible to persuasion. (shrink)

En la Constitución de la República de Polonia del 2 de abril de 19971 se reconocía el carácter objetivo de ciertos valores y un cognoscitivismo axiológico. Si tomamos las disposiciones constitucionales en serio tenemos que aceptar que algunas valoraciones morales o que algunas proferencias [utterances] valorativas pueden ser verdaderas o falsas y que nos informan acerca de una realidad objetiva. Por otro lado, en la teoría del derecho polaca y en los cursos universitarios de lógica para abogados se encuentran definiciones (...) de la justificación axiológica de las normas y de normas axiológicas (normas que poseen una justificación axiológica) que presuponen que ningún valor es objetivo y que no pueden ser conocidos — se presupone un no-cognoscitivismo axiológico. De acuerdo con el no-cognoscitivismo, ninguna valoración y ninguna proferencia valorativa puede ser verdadera o falsa, ni puede informar acerca de la realidad. En este trabajo se analiza la concepción no-cognoscitivista de Zygmunt Ziembiński tal y como ha sido formulada en su libro de texto lógica práctica [Logika praktyczna] — el cual ha formado intelecTraduddo del inglés por Jorge Cerdio; título original: «True Norms in the Light of Axiological Justification of Norms». Relectura: Germán Sucar. La Constitución de la República de Polonia [Konstytucja Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej] del 2 de abril de 1997, Dziennik Ustaw, 1997. No. 78, item 483. Versión en inglés en Gierach, 2009: 21. 6S6 Mark Piechowiak tualmente a dos generaciones de abogados polacos y ha establecido el estándar bajo el que se entienden las justificaciones axiológicas y las normas axiológicas2. Su definición de valoración y de normas excluyen la posibilidad misma de un discurso significativo acerca de las valoraciones o acerca de las normas en términos de verdad o falsedad. (shrink)

Truth seems to be an indispensable element of authority which presents itself as being based on more than just power and efficiency. In the domain of law,there is not only and primarily the problem of establishing the truth about the facts which are to be judged; there is also the problem of norms—does their authority rest solely on the act of establishing them, or is there “something behind”, a truth which contributes to the strength of law, and which provides legitimacy (...) to both legislator and to the legal norms themselves. In theoretical reflection, the very possibility of talking about true norms or true evaluations is under challenge, and this view dominates in the academic education of lawyers and other professionals. At the basis of this project lies the conviction that the problem of true norms, and the more general problem of the place of truth in law, is worth re-examining. In the course of such a re-examination, it is also worth returning to certain points in the tradition of thinking about the foudations of law. In the tradition recalled by the papers presented here—by both Italian and Polish authors—a prominent place is occupied by Polish thinkers such as Leon Petrażycki, Czesław Znamierowski, and Zygmunt Ziembiński. The book consists of three major parts. The titles—Tradition, Theory, Practice mark important points of reference in the reflection on truth in the context of law. The contributions relate to these points in different degrees, and each, though placed in one of these parts, also refer to the others. (shrink)