A Centenary of Legal Education at the University of Lublin. The Early-Stage Challenges
A Centenary of Legal Education at the University of Lublin. The Early-Stage Challenges

Summary/Abstract: Catholic University of Lublin (until 1928 named University of Lublin) is the oldest university in Lublin and one of the oldest Polish universities. It was established in 1918, at a time of huge significance to the Polish statehood. It was then, after 123 years of captivity, that Poland regained its independence. The founder of the university, Father Idzi Radziszewski, assumed that the new academic centre would educate lawyers alongside the specialists in theology, humanities and church studies. Therefore, the moment when the university was established was also when the Faculty of Law and Socio-economic Sciences came into being. Despite the enormous enthusiasm that accompanied the establishment of the university, its various faculties, and the emerging opportunities to educate law students, severe difficulties were looming over the new legal faculty. The most acute of these difficulties were the lack of professorial staff and the lack of authorization to award law degrees and diplomas. If it were not for the appropriate actions taken by the University and Faculty authorities, these problems could have led to the rapid shutdown of the Faculty. In the former case, the professors of other Polish universities were asked to assist the didactic endeavours of the Lublin Faculty of Law through temporary or full-time employment at the Catholic University of Lublin. A positive response came from various academic centres, among which the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv deserves special recognition. It were the Lviv professors in particular who commuted to Lublin to work at the Faculty of Law, and in many cases also performed diverse administrative functions. The latter problem was also solved with the help of the Lviv University. When the graduates of the Lublin Faculty of Law were not able to obtain their graduation diplomas locally, these were issued by the Lviv Faculty of Law. As a result, during the first few years of the academic activity in Lublin, the students educated at the Catholic University of Lublin earned a diploma from the University of Lviv. It was a solution that led to certain organisational complications, yet it was the only feasible option in the circumstances when the state authorities constantly delayed granting KUL full rights to confer academic degrees. Naturally, the outbreak of World War II was another challenge for the existence of the University and the Faculty. After twenty years of its early-stage organizational effort and activity, the University of Lublin had to suspend its operation for a few years, to finally resume its life it in more advantageous times. To this day, the Catholic University of Lublin has been functioning and developing dynamically, and the problems that occurred several decades ago contributed to its development. This difficult history paved the way for the university and the Faculty of Law to function and thrive for over a hundred years.

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