The current decade brought a neo-authoritarian wave to the countries in CEE. This process, which in certain respects runs parallel to the populist upsurge in Western countries, has its own specificity. Firstly, by focusing on the clash between “elites” and “the people”, it rekindles – in a displaced, right-wing form – the class conflict which before 1989 was an ideological staple in CEE countries. Secondly, insofar as neo-authoritarianism in CEE has often a distinctly neo-liberal agenda shadowed by declarative anti-globalism and national chauvinism, it warps the field of political struggle. Thirdly, in the neo-authoritarian turn law becomes the crucial field of ideological fight, principally in those countries where populists came to power. In this respect, new governments in CEE resort to a blend of old Fascist tools (such as dismantling of constitutional control and denying the primacy of international law) and new inventions (such as the effective state of exception in some areas of law in Poland introduced in 2015–18). The role of critical jurisprudence in CEE is therefore particularly significant and difficult. The paper argues that liberal jurisprudence, although actively engaged in analysing neo-authoritarianism, does not possess adequate conceptual tools for full success. Therefore critical jurisprudence should urgently take part in explaining neoauthoritarianism in the legal field.
The aim of the present article is to reflect upon the ontological presuppositions of critical jurisprudence (critical legal science), understood as a set of assumptions in the domain of social ontology, which determine the identity of this form of general reflection upon law. The article proposes to identify four such assumptions: the assumption concerning the political character of the social world; the assumption on the social construction of the social world; the assumption of paninterpretationism; the assumption of the existence of epistemic communities.
The present paper is a reaction to Maciej Pichlak’s article "Law in the Snares of the Political: Addressing Rafał Mańko’s Critical Philosophy of Adjudication" which was published in this journal (“The Critique of Law” 2020, 12(3), pp. 109–125). The present response addresses selected issues raised in Pichlak’s critique, focusing on three aspects: law and the political, the importance of justice in the critical project, and finally the question of adjudication and ideology. On a more general note, the polemic reveals the importance of philosophical, political and ideological commitments and presuppositions of legal theorists and poses the question of the limits of the autonomy of jurisprudential debates vis-à-vis such commitments.
The aim of the present paper is to contribute to the on-going discussion, both in legal theory and in comparative law, concerning the status of Central Europe and its delimitation from other legal regions in Europe, notably Romano-Germanic Western Europe but also Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The paper adopts the methodological perspective of critical legal geography, understood as a strand of critical jurisprudence laying at the interstices of spatial justice studies, critical geography, comparative law, sociology of law and legal history. The paper proceeds by identifying the notion of Central Europe with reference to a specific list of countries, then proposes a number of objective criteria for delimitng Central Europe and applies them in order to highlight the difference between Central Europe and other adjacent legal regions. Following that, the paper enquires as to whether Central Europe should be deemed to be a ‘legal family’, a ‘legal union’ or simply a ‘legal space’ or ‘space of legal culture’.
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