Criminal Legislation at the Time of Poland’s Regaining Independence

Abstract

The third partition of Poland, and thus the collapse of the Polish state, spontaneously forced a situation in which the legal orders of the partitioning states came into force almost immediately on Polish lands. In the lands divided between Prussia, Russia and Austria, legal acts of the partitioning states came into force with a strong influence of models derived from French legislation. The Polish lands which came under Austrian rule found themselves in the reality, in which the Austrian legislator conducted codification works on the new penal code, which resulted in the fact that in 1787 the penal code of Joseph II, called Josephine, became binding. As early as 1803, a penal code was introduced in Poland, which was under Austrian rule, under the name of the Book of Laws on Crimes and Serious Police Crimes called Franciscan. In the German annexation there was the Prussian Landrecht, which was characterized by a current far removed from the European science of law. On the territory of the former Duchy of Warsaw a Penal Code for the Kingdom of Poland was introduced. In Russia in 1903, the Tagantsev’s Code came into force, which in its systematics divided crimes according to their gravity into crimes and misdemeanours and clearly separated minor offences. The characteristics of criminal legislation until 1918 made it possible to show the enormity of the work of the Codification Commission, the aim of which, after Poland regained independence, was to create a uniform and coherent Polish legal system, not only in terms of social life standards, but also in the area of the catalogue of its areas.