This paper examines the roots of Poland’s rule-of-law crisis, arguing that its origins extend beyond the populist turn of 2015 and are deeply rooted in systemic deficiencies within the Poland’s legal culture. While mainstream scholarship often attributes the crisis narrowly to the post-2015 actions of the Law and Justice government, this paper adopts a socio-structuralist perspective, situating the crisis within broader historical, intellectual, and institutional contexts. It critiques psychological-cultural explanations of the crisis for their reductionist focus on agents of populism, advocating instead for a nuanced understanding of the socio-political and cultural conditions that made the rule of law crisis both possible and likely. The paper highlights the role of legal scholarship in shaping the prevailing legal imaginary of juristic scientism, which emerged during the communist era as a defence against authoritarianism but persisted into the democratic period. It argues that this imaginary, depicting law as something objective, scientific and apolitical, has contributed to the weak legitimacy of Poland’s legal system, hindering the development of democratic ideals and a robust rule-of-law culture. This influence is traced through legal education, where students are trained to memorize ‘objective legal truths’ rather than critically discuss the content and broader implications of law, and through the judiciary, criticized for formalism, poor justification quality, and a failure to deliver substantive justice. By exploring the intellectual roots of Poland’s rule-of-law crisis, the paper explores the interplay between legal culture, education, and institutional practices, offering insights into the broader dynamics of democratic backsliding in Poland. It concludes that addressing these deeply embedded deficiencies is crucial for fostering a resilient rule-of-law culture.
Wojciech Zomerski is a socio-legal scholar specialising in the history of legal thought, the authoritarian legacies of law, and its prospects for democratization. As a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI, Wojciech will investigate populist constitutionalism in Poland and Hungary, analysing whether populist constitutional discourse is truly aligned with the practices of populists in power. He aims to determine whether populist discourse has genuine descriptive and normative potential or whether it serves solely as a legitimizing façade. In 2020, Wojciech defended his PhD thesis on how Polish legal education perpetuates pre-democratic communist legacies, earning recognition from the Polish Section of IVR for the second-best doctoral dissertation in legal theory in 2020-2021. His recent book Towards a Democratic Legal Science? Dogmatics, Education, Post-Analyticity (in Polish), based on his doctoral research, explores the links between legal culture and the rule of law crisis.