Poland

1918 to 1939

The necessity of integration of the state after 1918 stimulated law and society scholarship. The main tool used for the process of integration of territories from the three empires (Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia) was law. Experiences from that process stimulated reflection on the place and role of law in society and the state.

In the first half of the 1930s, the process of institutionalization of social scientific reflections on law took place mainly in the form of lectures in sociology of law and publications in that field. In the period before World War II, the biggest influence on this scholarship in Poland was Leon Petrażycki (1867–1931), who from 1919 held the first chair in sociology in the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Warsaw. Under his influence, a Polish sociology of law developed that questioned narrow positivistic and statist concepts of law understood as a system of norms that are valid only because state authorities promulgate them.

The Polish approach to law under Petrażycki perceived law as reciprocal relations of duties and rights. All norms that imposed an obligation on one party correlated with a duty of another party to act in an expected way; the state recognized these norms as legal. Scholars followed Petrażycki's distinction between official and intuitive law. They further researched questions he raised. These included the functions of law in society; the difference between law and morality, customs, and religion; the role law plays in constituting a system of property rights and relations; the impact of law on changes in social consciousness; and the impact of legal consciousness on the processes of social change. The Polish approach gave special effort to law's policy. Petrażycki's idea of “scientific policy of law” was to create and apply such a law that would direct society and its members toward “rational and active love.” To achieve that aim, it was necessary to discover the mechanisms of individual and collective behavior and to research the outcome of those interactions, namely, customs and institutions.

Poland under Communism

Scholars initially treated law and society research in Poland under the communist regime as non-Marxist. Research and teaching on sociolegal issues then occurred within the vulgar Marxist general theory of state and law. The revival of empirical and theoretical scholarship in the 1960s began with research on attitudes toward law, social prestige of law, divorce, social context of family law, functions of law, and legal culture. Adam Podgórecki (1925–1998) conducted this research.

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