Reguły kwalifikacji archiwalnej akt spraw karnych w rozporządzeniu o przechowywaniu i niszczeniu akt sądowych z 1937 r. O genezie i skutkach międzywojennych reguł oceny wartości archiwalnej akt sądów powszechnych

Abstract

Rules of Criminal Court Record Archival Appraisal in the Provisions on the Court Records Storage and Disposal from 1937. On the Genesis and Results of Interwar Regulation on Determining the Value of the Polish Common Court Documentation An article is devoted to what is a crucial problem for every historian of the 19th and 20th centuries – historical rules of archival appraisal, that is, the determination as to which records that were created for practical reasons and current activities of state institutions in the past, should be protected permanently because of their historical value. The author focuses on criminal court records in light of the Polish interwar rules enacted by the Justice Minister in 1937. The mentioned regulation was the first on an analyzed matter in Polish legal tradition. It set the essential criteria and mechanisms for court records archival appraisal, also adopted in later rules on this topic from 1975, 1989, and 2004 (the latest remains in force to the present). Beyond this the author tries to explain why, in 1937, the Polish Ministry established rules that intended to permanently protect only a few groups of criminal court records as being historically valuable. He mainly analyzes the primary regulation draft from January of 1937, which intended to cover more groups of criminal court records for permanent archival protection. The paper tries to establish the reasons as to why those propositions were rejected. In the end, the author purposes to set in motion a discussion of the consequences that resulted from rules adopted in 1937 for current legal-historical or historical-criminological research.