Polish Jurisprudence in the 20th Century: A General Overview

The present paper provides a general overview of the sources of inspiration and main currents in Polish jurisprudence in the 20th century, especially in the post-War and contemporary period. The paper notes that the main sources of inspiration in the early 20th century included Leon Petrażycki, Bronisław Wróblewski, Czesław Znamie-rowski and Jerzy Lande, who exerted a great influence on the first generation of Polish post-War legal theorists. The Lvov-Warsaw school of analytical philosophy also had a huge impact on Polish jurisprudence, as the school to a large extent determined the research questions posed by Polish legal theorists. Indeed, analytical legal theory can be said to have dominated Polish jurisprudence from the 1950s up to the end of the 1980s. After 1989, a broad current of new philosophical approaches to jurisprudence emerged, including legal hermeneutics and philosophies of interpretation, legal ethics, postmodern and critical legal theory, the phenomenology of law as well as an original Polish achievement – the legal theory of ‘juriscentrism’.