The Judicial Application of Law (Law and Philosophy Library, 15)

This is the English version of Jerzy Wroblewski's major work in Polish, S~dowe Stosowania Prawa (translated in his own preferred terms as 'The Judicial Application of Law'). The present translation arose out of a visit by the author to Scotland in 1989. In that year, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland made it possible for Jerzy Wroblewski to spend six months as a Carnegie Fellow in the Centre for Criminology and the Social and Philosophical Study of Law at the University of Edinburgh. During that time he took a notably active part in the intellectual life of the Centre and the Faculty of Law. He gave freely of his time in teaching and advising students and also produced a series of original articles on topics connected with legal reasoning and law and computers. His major task while he was here, however, was to prepare a translation of S~dowe Stosowania Prawa, and this he accomplished to the extent of completing a preliminary draft. Zenon Bankowski and Neil MacCormick were to help him in improving this linguistically and preparing the final text for publication. Wroblewski warned us, having finished his draft with great labour, that the greater labour would be in the polishing of it. For we would have, as he joked, 'to translate my English into English'. And certainly, we found it extremely time-consuming, so as to defy completion during his stay in Edinburgh. Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction....Pages 1-8 Front Matter....Pages 9-9 Description of the Judicial Application of Law....Pages 11-22 Models of Judicial Application of Law....Pages 23-29 Descriptive Models of Judicial Application of Law....Pages 30-60 Normative Models of Judicial Application of Law....Pages 61-72 Front Matter....Pages 73-73 Validity of Law and Decision of Validity....Pages 75-86 Operative Interpretation and Decisions of Interpretation....Pages 87-130 Determination of Facts and Decisions on Evidence....Pages 131-188 Determination of Legal Consequences, Decision of the Choice of Consequences and the Final Judicial Decision....Pages 189-208 Rationality and the Correctness of a Decision of the Application of Law....Pages 209-262 Front Matter....Pages 263-263 Judicial Application of Law and the Ideological Point of View....Pages 265-272 The Ideology of Bound Judicial Decision-Making....Pages 273-283 The Ideology of Free Judicial Decision-Making....Pages 284-304 The Ideology of Legal and Rational Judicial Decision-Making....Pages 305-314 The Judge and the Application of Law....Pages 315-329 Back Matter....Pages 330-359

The Judicial Application of Law is an important contribution to analytical jurisprudence. It gives a thorough account of all that is involved in the idea of 'applying' law as this is carried out by judges. Thus it explores analytically a vital idea for our understanding of legality as a value to which systems of government aspire. This is achieved by the rigorous construction and examination of models of the various steps involved in judicial decision making, including elements both of interpretation and of fact finding, and by the exploration of various possible ideologies of the application of law.
The book takes as its main material for analysis statute-based legal systems in the form these took within socialist legal systems prior to the recent revolutions, being based principally on the law of Poland up to 1989.
This is the last work, posthumously translated, by the most distinguished analytical jurisprudent of modern Poland.