Legitymizacja roli sędziowskiej
Legitimizing the Role of the Judge

Summary/Abstract: According to Max Weber’s postulate, sociologists can predict and explain actions because they understand their subjective sense. The article suggests that this postulate can be extended onto macroscale, and sociology can search for meanings of processes that are beyond the grasp of the subjects participating in them. The perspective of functional differentiation that enhances this approach has been applied in order to describe the social role of the judges. While initially following Niklas Luhmann, the author abandons his theory at some point and draws on the ideas of Shmuel Eisenstadt to demonstrate the role of social values in the legitimization of the independent judiciary. The argumentation is based on a large-scale survey among the Polish judges as well as a typology of legitimization and delegitimization processes. In the conclusion, the attacks of the new authoritarian regimes on judges have been described from the functional perspective in order to demonstrate the real scale of their harm to modern societies.

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