1 The Universal Dimension of the Problem of Ideologization of Private Law
Historico-legal literature available in international circulation – which is essentially coterminous with its availability in at least one of the English, French, German or Spanish languages – has a dearth of studies tracing the development (especially codification) of modern positive law in the various countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Only recently has the situation slowly begun to change with regard to studies on private law in this part of Europe, for the most part thanks to the research initiated and conducted by Martin Löhnig and Anna Moszyńska.1 Only precious few satisfactory cognitive results can be found when it comes to legal developments in the eastern part of the continent. Certain important cognitive threads have not yet gained currency in international academic circles. They do not enjoy wide-scale publicity, or they are simplified or even misrepresented. This contrasts with the familiarity of the legal history of Western Europe.
Moreover, the problem of the ideological framework underpinning the reforms of Polish private law implemented throughout the 20th century has not yet been made the subject of study, or at least not from the classical perspective of theories of modernization and dependence. This is due above all to the fact that private law is mainly studied with the use of formal-dogmatic methods (doctrinal research), which is also applied to historical studies in private law (the Dogmengeschichte method analysing the historical evolution of individual institutions of private law). What is definitely lacking is more profound reflection on the long-term social, economic and political role played by private law, its principles and institutions in Polish socio-economic reality, together with desirable directions of transformation. This lack of reflection has become even more prominent nowadays, when – two decades after Poland’s accession to the European Union – differences between the respective axiologies of Polish and
Our book intentionally breaks with certain standards of a classic work in the discipline of legal history. The point of departure here is the premise that legal history should deliver something more than just the description of a legal system as it stands at a given point in history. With this goal in mind, we constantly endeavoured to examine the ideas motivating the introduction of specific solutions into private law, shaping its principles and institutions. We embarked on an analysis of the constituent parts of the system of private law, observing them through the lens of instruments designed to serve specific ideological and axiological purposes. On the one hand, there are postulates formulated already in the 19th century by a nationalist ideology calling for a codification of private law adapted to the allegedly unique characteristics – psyche, spirit and customs – of a specific nation. On the other hand is the perception of modernization as a positive value. The socialist and communist ideology invoked ideals of social solidarism, leading to the de facto disintegration of this concept. The liberal (or, more modernly, neo-liberal) ideology manifests itself through modern private law grounded in ideals of individual autonomy.
The ideological questions relating to private law can be addressed on three levels. The first, external level is composed of extralegal ideologies (liberalism, nationalism, socialism or conservatism) falling more or less in line with modernization or traditionalism. The second level – internal and spanning the entire legal system – represents ideologies such as legal positivism, normativism or legal modernism. The third level groups ideologies founded on the paradigms of the previous two ideological levels on the one hand and profiled by the current requirements of time and place on the other hand. Our work concentrates on inquiries pertaining to this third level.
While extralegal ideologies are well-described by political scientists and historians of political ideas, general intralegal ideologies are the field of study of historians of legal ideas, legal theoreticians and philosophers, in whose fields ‘current’ legal ideologies are usually more difficult to identify. On the third level, the legal ideology is often hidden behind a veil of simulated or seemingly but not truly neutral legal institutions. Legal institutions such as legal personality, the principle of pacta sunt servanda, the concept of tort liability or inheritance by family members are natural, and they are neutral to the point that it is difficult to decode whatever ideological content they might possibly carry. All, however, correspond to a certain normalized vision of social reality, which is ultimately an ideological construct.
2 Research Objectives
The authors intended to explore and explain the premises guiding the development of the Polish system of private law in the 20th century. This includes trying to answer the question of what reasons dictated the choice of one regulatory solution over the other, also affecting private law course of development as a whole, as well as what goals the various groups of legal experts working on all the drafts and blueprints (with particular emphasis on codification commissions)2 had in mind; lastly, and to a lesser degree, how such blueprints were realized in specific statutes and especially how those were interpreted by legal scholars and judges.
Among the aforementioned objectives, there are some far-reaching ones that were also ideological in nature, driven by a long-term vision and belief that the law can be used as an efficient instrument of social engineering and can become the vehicle of change in the chosen direction, so as to materialize a specific ideological vision or axiological precept. A distinction must here be drawn between the goals thus defined and any short-term changes of direction – sometimes unintentional – occurring for simpler reasons, without being accompanied by any desire for a more durable effect, as well as strictly functional and technical changes aimed only at streamlining the operation of the system. Our analysis, therefore, focuses on the instrumental use of private law in pursuit of a certain consciously chosen and followed political line, in connection with the ideological and axiological tenets professed by the initiators of such changes.
The study is grounded in the assumption that the fundamental elements of the private-law system – including a number of principles and regulatory solutions constituting the foundation of private law – have not as yet been modified. Notwithstanding the changes occurring in civil law, civil procedure or commercial law, the original work product of the interwar Codification Commission (1919–1939) in the form of its various codes and unrealized drafts, as well as principles and institutions stipulated by their provisions, has continued to supply the main point of reference for and inform the direction taken by the development of Polish law until – as we assume and go on to verify – the present day.
The above does not change the fact that the 20th century, in a contradiction to most other periods of history, was not a homogeneous era. From a Polish and wider European perspective, the conditions in which Poland’s private law was given shape varied dynamically. The key turning points were the two successive fundamental transitions of the political system: the building of a socialist state after World War ii and of a liberal democracy after 1989. Each caused an upheaval of the entire social, economic and political reality, as well as the legal reality of its time. According to a commonly held conviction, which we set out to verify in this book, the ideological goals espoused by those in power were entirely redefined. All this could not but have a strong impact upon the legal system previously in existence, including the sphere of private law.
Nevertheless, it was hypothesized and subsequently verified in the course of our research that the stability of the system of private law, expanded upon by the interwar Codification Commission, was not irretrievably shaken up. Admittedly, during the period of the building of a socialist legal system, certain important structural elements of private law – especially commercial law – underwent fundamental changes. Nevertheless, we proceeded from the hypothesis that the systemic skeleton expanded upon in the interwar period had been retained. As a result, also the subsequent systemic transformation of 1989 did not necessitate – and this constituted a further hypothesis advanced in this study – a complete overhaul of the system of private law; whatever reforms were undertaken essentially came down to the restoration of ideas, principles and legal institutions already designed in the interwar period.
In other words, we set out to determine whether the scope and form of the systemic regulatory solutions designed during the interwar period and adopted at that time or adopted without major changes just after World War ii (1945–1946) could have been rescinded in the course of the major legal reform carried out in the process of ‘socialism-building’ (the three codes of 1964: Civil Code, Code of Civil Procedure, Family and Guardianship Code). The surviving underpinning solutions from the interwar era made it a relatively easier task to achieve the restoration the old legal order amid the systemic transformation executed after 1989 (on the wave of which the codes of 1964 were not repealed).3 Moreover, also at a later time, despite the emerging trend of harmonization of private law in the European Union, even the transposition of
Our research focused on the ideology (premises and goals) of the actors influential in the development of private law throughout the legislative reforms of the 20th century. We distinguished three major eras:
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The interwar period (1919–1939) in which we focused on the activities of the Codification Commission in the field of private law and the Commission’s drafting output, regardless whether a given draft managed to be enacted into law before the outbreak of World War ii (e.g. the Code of Obligations, Commercial Code and Code of Civil Procedure) or provided the basis for legislation enacted after the war, especially the General Provisions of Civil Law, the Personal Law of Marriage, the Law of Matrimonial Property, the Real Law and the Law of Succession, all enacted as piecemeal statutes between 1945 and 1946, entering into force on 1 January 1947. The fundamental research question concerning the aforementioned legislative texts and their preparation concentrates on the ideological premises underlying the draft bills and their rejected alternatives, including the reasons leading to their rejection.
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The period of the ‘people’s democracy’ (1944–1989), in which we focus primarily on the ideological modalities of the legal reform carried out in the aftermath of World War ii (the unification decrees of 1945–1946), the partial reforms of private law accomplished in 1950 (the new General Part of Civil Law and the new Family Code),4 and, finally, the ground-up reconstruction of private law in 1964 (with its three codes: Civil Code, Code of Civil Procedure, Family and Guardianship Code). We focus on the foundations and assumptions that enabled the drafters and the legislative decision-makers to reach a consensus as to the basic principles the codes of 1964 would embody.
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The period of systemic transformation following after the events of 1989, when the decommunization of private law – the ‘purging’ of it of communist leftovers – was coupled with falling back on the pre-war traditions so as to modernize the country’s private law on the basis of Western models, with emphasis on Europeanization of private law.
In each of these periods, our studies explored the premises underlying the bills and the surrounding or preceding debates unfolding in the legal circles (especially the codification commissions), on the one hand in academia and on the other hand in political circles desirous to achieve defined goals through a suitable constellation of legislative drafts. The successive codification commissions, however, did not operate in a vacuum. They were recruited from academics and practitioners whose opinions reflected the ideology and world view of Polish legal elites. Accordingly, our presentation of the ideology and axiology of the narrower circles directly responsible for the design and preparation of reforms of Polish private law juxtaposes and compares them with the academic voices of Polish legal scholars touching on the choice of directions for the evolution and transformation of private law and goals to be attained by the selection of institutions and legal principles. In this context, we also needed to account for the general trends prevailing in the individual periods in political and social thought and philosophy of law, because of their impact on the axiological and ideological layer. Furthermore, we took note of the views expressed by the political elites, their ideology, and doctrinal stances, which, however, we analysed only succinctly. Nevertheless, the ideology of the ruling elites marks an important point of reference for the principal focus of our research that is the axiology and ideology of the legal circles. Therefore, our intention was to analyse the network of mutual interdependencies between political and legal circles, focusing on parallel aspects and differences on points dealing with the fundamental characteristics of private law, as well as to analyse the mutual influence between the two groups.
As the main research hypothesis, we took the premise that, regardless of the changing political reality, the fundamental and generally understood paradigm of thinking about the role of law did not change over the course of the 20th century. This is because the axis of the debate on the construction and transformation of private law within each of the analysed periods was determined by:
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on the one hand, the national ideology seeking the fulfilments of needs connected with strengthening Poland’s national identity and furthering the interests of the Polish nation, which could be achieved by creating laws closely tailored to Poland’s national characteristics or ‘specificity’;
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on the other hand, modernization tendencies prompting the use of foreign models and the emulation of those other countries whose directions of development of law and legal culture was deemed to be worth pursuing.5
Both the national interest and the modernizing occidentalism could each be very differently defined, depending on the method of description used; especially, however, depending on the period during which the debate was taking place and the concomitant changes in the political and socio-economic conditions. This is a factor that distinguishes, in particular, the period of ‘People’s Poland’ from the other periods that we will be investigating.
The pressure to pursue modernization manifested itself in the fact that, whatever the chronological period, the legislators finding themselves under that pressure aspired to design a ‘progressive’ draft or, to be more precise, a draft corresponding to their own notion of modernity.6 In pursuit of that goal, lawyers and jurists often created specific modernization models. Usually, those models were inspired by foreign solutions, often originating from a different cultural circle. On the one hand, they included the most up-to-date legislative achievements, such as whatever codes, principles and institutions were considered to be particularly progressive in a given historical period, as well as concepts and theoretical constructs developed and elaborated by academics and not necessarily tested in practice. On the other hand, and in a different perspective, they reflected the desired directions of social, economic and political changes. Those, the law sought to further by establishing development-stimulating institutions, while at the same time allowing for the adaptation of the legal system that was being created ‘here and now’ to what its drafters anticipated to follow in the future. A modernization trend in this sense was a somewhat universal notion for the era, whether it was rooted in liberal or socialist slogans and in whatever way it happened to understand and represent the canon of democratic values or, on the contrary, perhaps advocate for its abandonment. For the aforementioned reasons, the aforesaid paradigm of modernization and progress informs our studies both for the part relating to the interwar era and for the part dealing with the period of radical ideological change in the aftermath of World War ii (the socialist transformation), as well as after 1989, with Poland returning to the Western world and values. In all three examined periods, we focused on the criteria determining the path chosen for the pursuit of modernization ideas, which constituted a determinant of progress.
One factor achieving significant autonomy within, but nonetheless remaining part of, the modernization current was the aspiration of Polish scholars to take global inventory of the development of international legal scholarship, thereby tracing the progress of studies done abroad and ultimately attaining a general view. For this aspect of the problem, our research covers the dominant trends in the legal community, beginning from the convictions held by Polish academic circles about the direction legal developments should take, as well as the world views and ideologies espoused by the experts tasked with preparing the legal reforms at hand.
In the entire analysed period (and, as a matter of fact, also before it), the conservative-national world view was placed in opposition to modernization trends; upon this world view an ideology was built according to which traditional, indigenous values should be respected, as well as reflected, protected and cherished in the legal regulations. This world view and the ideology founded upon it were strictly correlated with a certain canon of principles and institutions (national characteristics) genetically connected with the historical tradition of each individual country, nation or cultural area; this canon changed depending on the perspective taken and the historical moment. In the lens of this tendency, we tried to analyse how the elements constituting Polish national identity, tradition and legal culture were defined, and what specific rules of Polish social, economic and political life determined, in each period, the development trends in private law. Finally, we examined how this was influenced by the various pressure groups, beginning with the pursuit of political goals by the power apparatus, through other organizations and movements whose ideologized approach to law made an imprint on the shape of solutions adopted and their subsequent evolution in the process of judicial interpretation of the law.
The principal goal of this book was thus to determine the values the reformers of Polish private law in the 20th century were pursuing in their efforts. If they perceived the institutions of private law as an instrument that could be deployed in order to effect a change in the socio-economic or political reality, then in what directions and according to what premises were the reforms supposed to proceed? Applying to the individual periods the paradigm of goals informed by either the national or the modernization ideology, we found ourselves able to discern:
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for the interwar period:
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legal instruments aimed to strengthen the national identity, in keeping with the assumption that a uniform private law, contained in modern, coherent and linguistically attractive codes, would constitute a symbol of national unity and showcase of restored Polish legal culture to the outside world, as well as an important factor genuinely consolidating the nation, although there were differences in the understanding of both the concept of a nation and the way to consolidate it;
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instruments aimed to achieve a ‘capitalist’ modernization of the legal system on the basis of models and ideas considered to be the most modern (referring to the creations of other legal cultures, their legislative and academic achievements), as well as the modernization of socio-economic and political circumstances in line with social, economic and political ideas considered to be progressive;
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in both cases, the axis of our analysis was the degree of fascination with Western achievements and the capacity for their critical evaluation, as well as the criteria to be followed;
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for the socialist period:
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instruments aimed to achieve a socialist modernization of the country, with socio-economic engineering based on communist and socialist inspirations, Soviet models and directives coming from the
USSR , on the assumption that civil law was to be included in the process of ‘socialism-building’ and therefore take was intended to contribute to the creation of legal foundations for the dominance of ‘socialized property,’ along with a legal framework for contracts formed between ‘socialized economic units’ (literally: ‘units of socialized economy’) in a centrally planned system, and the development of a centralized co-operative sector; -
the policy of socialization (i.e. socialist transformation) of the law, particularly visible through civil-law instruments limiting the exercise of individual (‘subjective’) rights, which were required to conform to their socio-economic purpose; this was specifically manifest in certain rules of co-operative law, housing law and law of perpetual lease (also known as emphyteusis or – in literal translation – ‘perpetual usufruct’).
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3 Methodology
Our research was based on the analysis of source texts, in particular materials produced by the various legislative circles involved in the reforms of private law in Poland – especially the codification commissions directly responsible for the drafting – as well as the scholarly writings discussing and responding to such drafting activities, in particular by authors speaking from a clearly ideological perspective on the role and significance of private law, as well as its principles and institutions:
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materials of the Codification Commission of the Second Polish Republic;
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materials of the Ministry of Justice dealing with reforms of private law, available in the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw;
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explanatory memoranda attending the government bills instituting the reforms;
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writings by private-law scholars published in leading legal journals.
When focusing on the issue of the instrumental use of private law with a view to the achievement of specific long-term ideological and axiological goals (in particular national- and modernization-oriented), we firstly analysed the sphere of world views and value systems professed by the drafters of the private-law codes and other participants of the debate surrounding the reforms of private law. Accordingly, we used axiological and functional methods in our approach to the main research problem, namely how law functions as an instrument and the goals that such an instrument can be expected to achieve. When comparing the two periods under examination, we relied on the comparative method; among the things we compared were the modes of argumentation used to promote or advocate for specific solutions. We also looked for similarities in the presentation of the rationales and arguments invoking the various principles and institutions of private law, as well as characterizations of the system as a whole.
Furthermore, we employed classic methods of historical research to analyse the problems connected with the shaping of codification drafts. The descriptive method enabled us to reconstruct – with precision and in chronological order – the historical events, especially of political and socio-economic nature, that accompanied the discussions surrounding the private-law reforms and thus may possibly have influenced the course and outcome of the debate. By application of the doxographic method, we were able to present the leading views from in particular the perspective of their conceptual apparatus, which in turn allowed us to identify certain currents of legal thought and bring them to the front and centre.
The research also employed classic theoretical methods used in the humanities. We followed the inductive method. Since this is based on the analysis of specific facts in order to form general conclusions, we used it to extrapolate judgements on specific institutions, mechanisms and legal principles onto reasons for their application or non-application, especially in the context of their being national or modern. This method led to general findings concerning the methods of thinking and categorization of social and legal reality in the analysed texts. We also applied the deductive method, based on reasoning referred to specific phenomena in a situation in which certain general principles and mechanisms are already known. This method was employed in particular on the basis of the assumption that Polish legal thought had relied on a certain canon of general rules taken from Western legal scholarship as a reference point but, on the other hand, also assumed certain values to be specifically Polish or treated them as such. Such texts relating to private law with its various branches and subdisciplines as were of particular utility in the application of this method were analysed by us from a general perspective involving the conceptualisatation of law as a certain system (normative network) capable of changing the reality towards a certain direction.
Incidentally, the following methods would have been inadequate for our research project:
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classic formal-dogmatic method, as it seeks to reconstruct the content of legal norms, whereby any extranormative (e.g. ideological) functions of law are out of scope;
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the method of legal philosophy, as our aim was to analyse not the philosophical foundations of private-law reforms but rather their ideological instrumentalization;
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methods of empirical sociology of law, such as those inspired by P. Bourdieu’s critical sociology, as our aim was not to analyse the societal impact of reforms of private law.
4 Structure
We divided this monograph into four main parts:
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General remarks about ideology in private law in a chapter by Rafał Mańko.
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The history of Polish private law and its ideology in the interwar period in a chapter by Michał Gałędek.
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The ideology of the authors of Polish private law after World War ii until 1989. This part contains three chapters (3–5) by Anna Machnikowska and Michał Gałędek.
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The last chapter, covering the period from the transformation of 1989 to 2000, by Anna Machnikowska.
The purpose of the first part was to make a strong argument in favour of fostering the intellectual collaboration of historians of private law with critical legal theorists. The outcome of such collaboration could be an ideological history of private law (i.e. ideological analysis of elements of history of private law), where – in a transdisciplinary (or even postdisciplinary) fashion – the tools of critical legal theory would be employed by historians of private law, as well as critical legal theorists would benefit from the insights of private-law historians into the historical unfolding of ideological struggles in the field of private law.
Analysing the interwar period (1919–1939) in the second chapter, we attempted to test the hypothesis that, in the course of the drafting of a new system of private law by the Codification Commission and in the course of the public debate, there was a clash between – on the one hand – modernization ideas implying a search for models and determinants of modernity in comparative research into various legal systems in Europe and the rest of the world and – on the other hand – calls for the expectations of society, its customs and respect for a certain canon of traditional ways of social and economic life to be considered. In the latter vision, the law should address national needs, strengthen the nation, and conform to certain traditional features of the nation.
On the basis of the research material we had selected, we tried to analyse the reasons for the adoption of certain solutions and rejection of their alternatives, as well as why a given solution was deemed to be the best, especially on the basis of its purportedly native Polish origin, so that it could foster the national values and consolidate the nation or, on the contrary, on the basis of its being progressive, so that it could help drive the modernization of society. We analysed the problem of what values and aims were providing the point of reference for the actors engaged in the process of building a system of private law for Poland.
As for the law of obligations, commercial law and civil procedure, we analysed the relationship between the individual actors and the then-dominant tendency towards the international unification of those legal areas. We were interested in how this process of unification was envisaged especially in the context of the need for the protection of certain specific national customs, features and interests. The key research questions we saw the need to address for these fields are: what conditions a given code had to fulfil in order to be considered modern (i.e. the hallmark factor of modernity) or to satisfy the criteria for being a work adapted to the Polish reality, one based on local traditions and meeting the expectations of Polish society. We will be paying special attention to the ideological battles fought in the course of the drafting works, along with the futility of the attempts to adopt the draft Matrimonial Law. The general assumption to be analysed is that within family law, the sphere of protection of national identity, the imagined features of the nation, as well as methods for strengthening this identity were to a greater extent opposed to modernization trends fuelled mainly by Western standards.
For the postwar period until 1989, which will be described in the later chapters, our attention focuses on legal institutions being newly introduced to Polish private law often in the emulation of Soviet models, and in particular new general clauses (principles of community life, socio-economic purpose),7 the stratification of ownership and its functional definition;8 the rules for special legal capacity of legal persons; the civil-law aspects of the functioning of socialized economic units (prescription, planned contracts, etc.), new rules governing the inheritance of farms; newly created property rights (perpetual lease; co-operative proprietary right to an apartment); new legal institutions in the law of obligations (contract for the provision of agricultural produce; contract of supply; co-operative tenancy right in an apartment; new rules in housing law) or, last but not least, the legal regime for co-operatives were treated as part of the ‘socialized’ sector of the economy.
We looked for common motives linking the three periods in the development of Polish private law in the 20th century but also searched for specifically Polish – or perhaps Central and Eastern European (semi-peripheral) – aspects of thinking about law, concentrating on the field of private law. To this end, we endeavoured to compare, for each of the analysed periods, the mental schemata, views on the nature of law, its social value and creational capacities, as well as value systems. Our research focused not so much on the approaches taken to any specific legal institutions individually (except to exemplify more general trends) but rather on the ideological premises intimated by the social actors (members of codification commissions, legal scholars, practitioners) in the course of the works on the reform of private law. Our attention was on such areas and aspects of private law as were undergoing a process of change and reformulation in a given period.
We were aware, and proceeded from the assumption, that the chronological period we had chosen for our research project was heterogeneous not only because of the dynamically changing realities of the 20th century, but first and foremost due to the fundamental reversal of the vectors in periods of country-building on the basis of a liberal model (1918–1939) and subsequently on the basis of the Soviet socialist model (1944–1989). However, this does not necessarily mean that the foundations of the socialist legal transformation were not, at least partially, founded on similar premises. To analyse this problem, we created a common comparative matrix for all three periods, based on a common paradigm of (usually opposing) national and modernization goals.
As a result, with our analysis grounded in this theoretical framework, we set out to analyse the extent to which in the post-transformation period the law was still perceived as an instrument used to strengthen or protect national identity, for instance through its adaptation to the specific characteristics of Polish society (its legal culture, customs, practices, characteristic features and various needs) determining to what extent similar practices with regard to similar legal principles and institutions had been applied not only in the interwar period, but also in the postwar period in the legislative projects of the 1950s and 1960s. This sort of approach and the underlying world view after 1989 could be exemplified by the misgivings of certain circles (political, judicial, academic or legislative) against the process of implementation of
Furthermore, we engaged in comparative scrutiny of the issue of what categories were considered by Polish legal and political elites to be modern. Even if the model was subject to radical change due to the differences between capitalist and socialist modernization, the question arises whether in Polish realities that truly meant a radical break with the previously accepted goals, ideas and values in the postwar period.9 Conversely, even if the reinstatement of a capitalist and democratic-liberal axiology in the period after 1989 was similar in many respects to the first decade of the Second Republic, one could still ask whether indeed the views on modernization may have undergone fundamental changes not only as a result of civilizational progress but also because of a different method being used for determining the model of modernization to be followed (e.g. a different perception of the West).
See e.g. Martin Löhnig, Anna Moszyńska (eds), Laboratorium für internationale gesetzgeberische Arbeit. Die Geburt der polnischen Rechtsordnung der Zwischenkriegszeit im europäischen Kontext, Böhlau Verlag, Wien, 2021.
Stanisław Grodziski: Prace nad kodyfikacją i unifikacją polskiego prawa prywatnego (1919–1947) [The process of codification and unification of Polish private law (1919–1947)], kpp 1 (1992)/1–4, 9–56; Stefan Grzybowski: Zagadnienia kodyfikacji polskiego prawa cywilnego (Organizacja i wyniki pracy 1919–1992) [Codification of Polish civil law: Work organization and products 1919–1992], kpp 1 (1992)/1–4, 91–114.
Jerzy Jodłowski: Les principes de la procedure civil polonaise, Revue internationale de droit comparé, 12 (1960)/2, 369–384.
Jerzy Jodłowski: Nowe drogi polskiego procesu cywilnego. Założenia ideologiczne reformy postępowania cywilnego [The new ways of Polish civil procedure. The ideological basis of the reform of civil proceedings], Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Sprawiedliwości, Warsaw, 1951; Anna Stawarska-Rippel: O politycznych założeniach procedury cywilnej w Polsce Ludowej [On the political foundations of civil procedure in People’s Poland], in Marian Mikołajczyk, Andrzej Drogoń (eds), Między i a iii Rzecząpospolitą: kształtowanie europejskiej kultury prawnej. Prace ofiarowane prof. zw. dr. hab. Adamowi Lityńskiemu w czterdziestolecie pracy naukowej [Between the First and Third Republics. The shaping of a European legal culture. Works dedicated to Professor Adam Lityński on the fortieth anniversary of his academic career], Miscellanea iuridica 7 (2005), 252–264.
Rafał Mańko: Relikty w kulturze prawnej: uwagi metodologiczne na tle pozostałości epoki socjalizmu realnego w polskim prawie prywatnym [Relicts in legal culture: methodological remarks against the background of remnants of real socialism in Polish private law], in Mariusz Jabłoński, Michał Paździora (eds), Postanalityczna filozofia prawa [Postanalytical philosophy of law], Przegląd Prawa i Administracji 102 (2015), 185–208; Rafał Mańko: Legal Survivals: A Conceptual Tool for Analysing Post-Transformation Continuity of Legal Culture, in Tiesību efektivitāte postmodernā sabiedrībā [Effectiveness of law in postmodern society], Jānis Rozenfelds et al. (eds), lu Akadēmiskais apgāds, Riga, 2015, 16–27.
Wojciech Witkowski, Andrzej Wrzyszcz: Modernisierung des Rechts auf polnischem Boden vom 19. bis Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, in Tomasz Giaro (ed.), Rechtskulturen des modernen Osteuropa. Traditionen und Transfers, vol. 1: Modernisierung durch Transfer im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 2006, 249–274.
Józef Nowacki: Niektóre zagadnienia zasad współżycia społecznego [Certain issues regarding the principles of social co-existence], PiP 12 (1957)/7–8, 99–113; Anna Stawarska-Rippel: O klauzulach generalnych w pierwszych latach Polski Ludowej słów kilka [A few words on general clauses in the first years of People’s Poland], Miscellanea Iuridica 6 (2005), 117–129.
Anna Machnikowska, Prawo własności w Polsce w latach 1944–1981. Studium historycznoprawne [The right of ownership in Poland between 1944 and 1981: a study in legal history], wug, Gdańsk, 2010; Jan Wasilkowski, Marek Madey: Prawo własności w prl. Zarys wykładu [The law of ownership in the Polish People’s Republic: outline of a lecture], pwn, Warsaw, 1969.
Rodolfo Sacco: The Romanist Substratum in the Civil Law of the Socialist Countries, Review of Socialist Law 14 (1988)/1, 65–86.