European cohesion policy in light of Leon Petrazycki's concept of legal policy

Abstract

Leon Petrażycki’s concept of legal policy, based on the author’s original assumptions, focuses on the social and economic legal actions aiming to the general social prosperity. Legal policy was strictly connected with the idea of the real acceptance of the law, understood by the author as a specific socio-psychic mental state, approved in an individual experience and confirmed in a social practice. Petrażycki was the first law theorist who clearly emphasised the meaning of multiplicity of legal sources and economical nature of law, as well as the necessity to acknowledge various languages and local cultures in its contents. This concept, developed much ahead-of-its-time in the ideas of Leon Petrazycki, contains a lot of solutions which are convergent with one of the most important European policies – EU cohesion policy. The objectives, assumptions and sources of cohesion policy, located at the junction of traditionally understood law-making, application of law and social and economic politics, are surprisingly similar to Petrażycki’s program. The author focuses on the subject of these relations.