The All-Polish conference ‘Contemporary problems of cultural heritage legal protection’, organized by the Department of Forensic Sciences of the Law, Administration and Economy Faculty of the University of Wrocław, was held on 28th November 2011 in Wrocław. The programme of the event was concentrated on the current challenges concerning the need for improvement of the system of monuments legal protection, in the normative sphere, as well as in the practice of art-works market. The conference was attended by representatives of academic community, cultural institutions, as well as law enforcement bodies. The debate was a forum for the exchange of views and remarks on practical problems connected with the application of legal regulations on monuments protection and gave the opportunity to put forward some de lege ferenda proposals regarding the domain of administrative, civil and penal law. The participants of the conference had an occasion to visit an exhibition entitled: ‘Police in the protection of national heritage’, devoted to the achievements of Polish law enforcement bodies in the field of combating crimes against the national heritage.
The paper attempts to examine the specifics of the turnover on the market of art in the light of the requirement of good faith in the framework of acquisition from a person without right or authority to transfer ownership. Particular regulations on the protection of monuments and works of art trade do not contain any separate normative solutions as to acquisition of this special category of movables. Therefore the main source of legal rules governing the turnover of art-works is the general regulation of Polish civil code, in particular its art. 169 that concerns the acquisition of ownership from a person without right or authority to transfer it. One of the conditions that determine legally effective transfer of ownership in acquisition from a non authorized person, is the purchaser’s good faith. In order to assess the purchaser’s good faith in acquisition of a work of art (a movable monument) a determinant standard of reasonable care needs to be built. It is necessary therefore to distinguish special features and determinants of the transactions having works of arts as the object that would set specific obligations and acts of care required from a purchaser. Translated by Bogna Kaczorowska
The aim of the study is to illustrate the wide spectrum of tendencies prevailing in contemporary legislations, as well as in the practice of turnover of legal transactions in the context of the phenomenon of contractual imbalance, and also to accomplish a cross-sectional review of juridical instruments of protective nature, making up the system of the so-called weaker party’s protection against abuse of the freedom of contract executed by the stronger party, specific for the consumer law. In the present study the author undertook to identify and outline one of the key trends in the currently observed evolution of the contract law, which is now characterized by numerous attempts at compensation, by means of legal remedies, for the effects of asymmetry in the parties’ contractual positions, not only in favour of consumers, but also in the field of B2B contracts. In this context a crucial task is to seek for the most appropriate criteria of definition of the so called weaker party as well as to evaluate to what extent can the consumer protection system be extended on the B2B contracts. The factor that vitally impinges upon the shape of the systems of the weaker party’s protection that are in force in individual national legal orders belonging to the European legal area, is the process of transposition of European directives. Moreover, several projects of uniform normalizations of universal, supranational nature, are of great importance, first of all non-binding PECL, DCFR, as well as Acquis Principles, which by assuming a wide viewpoint attempt to make generalizations and global assessments of normative solutions. The conclusions emerging from the legislative process as well as from the research undertaken during the preparation of the soft law proposals are expected to improve the global contractual turnover by preventing different cases of contractual asymmetry that can appear not only in consumer contracts.
Analyses done contemporarily, which are devoted to regulation of the construction of agreements, are directed towards searching for optimal solutions in the scope of interpretative rules, the application of which – both on the national level and in the supra-national dimension – would allow improving the process of the construction. Realization of the above-mentioned goal is possible thanks to acceptance of a broad research perspective, including also a critical verification of the rules that are popularly associated with the construction and fixed in the legal thought. In this context, legal maxim deriving from the Roman law are of special significance. They are attributed the value of universal rules constituting an expression of legal experience, verified in the many-a-century practice. From the point of view of the problem of construction of agreements, the maxim Cum in verbis nulla ambiguitas est, non debet admitti voluntatis quaestio, which is attributed to the Roman jurist Paulus, is truly worth paying attention to. It was included in the set of eighty-six inscriptions placed on the colonnade of the edifice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Poland in Warsaw, selected according to the criteria of timelessness, presence in the Polish practice and doctrine of law, as well as the possibility of finding, for them, some reference in contemporary law. The rule Cum in verbis… concerns directly the question – which is of the key importance to the domain of construction of agreements – of the order of preference and relations of intentions of subjects submitting declarations of will to the literal layer of the agreement, including the dominating assumption of the priority position of the real will (a joint intention) of the parties drawing up the agreement. It turns out to be justifiable to confront the interpretative directives resulting from the maxim Cum in verbis… with contemporary establishments of dogmatics of the civil law and the construction standards accepted in the process of unifying the private law, and also to make an attempt at evaluating its current character and justifiability of tis assumptions.
A scientific seminar on protection of numismatic monuments organized by the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Opole and the Customs Chamber in Opole with the cooperation of the Financial Law Association „Aureus” took place on 8th September 2011 in Opole. There were two papers presented during the seminar, both accompanied with multimedia presentation. Marcin Sabaciński (National Heritage Board of Poland, Archeology Department) focused on the presentation of institutional system of monuments protection in Poland and Polish legal regulations on protection and care of cultural heritage. Michał Zawadzki (Director of Numismatic Collection of the Royal Castle in Warsaw) gave a paper on the numismatics as a scientific discipline and presented the main types of historical coins, banknotes and other collector’s items as well as the characteristics of the numismatic market in Poland. The participants of the discussion held during the seminar paid attention to the need for closer cooperation among different entities dealing with protection of monuments, as well as for appropriate legislative initiatives in this field.
The historical-geographical description of the Republic of Poland at the beginning of the 17th century, which was included by Nuncio Claudio Rangoni in his Relacje o Królestwie Polskim z roku 1604 (Relations About the Kingdom of Poland of the Year 1604) was enriched with characteristics of the polity of the state, issues of the domestic and foreign policy, as well as the institution of public life, including judiciary. Taking into account its volume and detailed character, Rangoni’s presentation of the Polish judiciary at the beginning of the 17th century clearly distinguishes his work among other known reports left by Nuncios of the Holy See. The aim of the present work is to introduce, into the scientific circulation, the valuable source relating to the judiciary of the noblemen’s Republic of Poland. Besides offering detailed characteristics of the institution of judiciary of individual rungs, Rangoni’s work provides information on the course of court’s procedure and the most important institutions of the Old Polish legal procedure. The description of courts of the Republic of Poland at the beginning of the 17th century contains also a diagnosis of the condition of the then noblemen’s administration of justice, preceded by a retrospective analysis of the 16th-century projects of reform of the Polish system of administration of justice, especially the circumstances which accompanied the establishment of the Crown Court in 1578.
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