Polityka prawa – próba oceny strategii rządzenia Sądem Najwyższym w PRL
Politics of Law: An Attempt to Assess the Strategies of Governing the Supreme Court in PPR

Summary/Abstract: The goal of this article is to use available archival data, legislature, information on power structure and memoirs to reconstruct strategies of subject-ing Polish Supreme Court and its judges to the interests of the regime of the Polish People’s Re-public in the 1945-1989 period. The article is an attempt to assess the efficiency of these strategies based on internal reports of the government and party and to develop a simple statistical model to assess the maximal capacity for control of Supreme Court workload. The results show that due to highly complex nature of law, multitude of judicial tasks and limited resources of the elite, only a few of the strategies could and did work. Specifically, analysis of cognitive capacity of controller group shows that only extremely focused, coordinated and specialized efforts could successfully diagnose the judicial work. The political influence on law seems to have been limited to personal influence, candidate selection, re-evaluation of judges and filling of strategic position within the court

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