Legal mobilisation within the populist Supreme Court in Poland

KRZYŻANOWSKA NOWICKA, Katarzyna Karolina

doi:10.1017/S1744552324000247

Legal mobilisation within the populist Supreme Court in Poland

dc.contributor.author	KRZYŻANOWSKA NOWICKA, Katarzyna Karolina
dc.date.accessioned	2024-11-08T08:13:06Z
dc.date.available	2024-11-08T08:13:06Z
dc.date.issued	2024
dc.description	Published online: 07 November 2024	en
dc.description.abstract	Though the Polish rule of law crisis has been on the scholarly agenda since the Law and Justice Party (PiS) took power in 2015, the individual agents of legal disruption within the judiciary have been largely off the radar. This intervention aims to fill this gap. This article analyses the legal mobilisation practices of the Supreme Court (SC) judges appointed by the PiS party in a court-packing manner after 2017. It is argued that this is a specific type of legal mobilisation; because it is conducted from within the legal system by judges, it aims to challenge doctrinal views strategically and to legitimise the status of unlawfully elected judges, which consequently destabilises the legal system. Because the legal tools to solve the conflict appear to have been exhausted, new judges engage in public discourse to convince citizens that they have a right to sit on the bench. In the first part of this paper, I critically analyse this public discourse in order to explain the framing of the rule of law crisis. The analysis of this discourse is drawn from 106 texts produced by new SC judges between 2017 and 2023. It is argued that although the ‘populist’ group of SC judges is internally differentiated and does not exhibit clear ideological linkage with the PiS party, it strategically produces certain legal narratives in which their appointments and judicial practices at the SC conform to the Constitution and to relevant statutes and, as such, are legitimate in legal terms. The new judges’ narratives are based on four populist dichotomies that distinguish them from old judges (legitimacy–lack of legitimacy, autonomy–political dependence, formal rule of law–legal anarchy and accountability–corporatism). In the second part, the article proceeds to analyse selected case law of the Supreme Court to explore whether and how court-packing makes it more responsive to the legal mobilisation of the conservative Christian organisation Ordo Iuris (OI) and helps the governing party maintain its power. It is argued that the judicial mobilisation inside the packed Supreme Court is mostly of a discursive nature, as there is limited evidence that newly appointed judges side ideologically with the government and right-wing organisations in recent case law.	en
dc.description.sponsorship	This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025)	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	International journal of law in context, 2024, Vol. 20, No. SI 3, pp. 324-345	en
dc.identifier.doi	10.1017/S1744552324000247
dc.identifier.endpage	345	en
dc.identifier.issn	1744-5523
dc.identifier.issn	1744-5531
dc.identifier.issue	SI 3	en
dc.identifier.startpage	324	en
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1814/77441
dc.identifier.volume	20	en
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.orcid.putcode	1814/79872:175975854
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dc.publisher	Cambridge University Press	en
dc.relation.ispartof	International journal of law in context	en
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess	en
dc.rights.license	Attribution 4.0 International	en
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/	en
dc.title	Legal mobilisation within the populist Supreme Court in Poland	en
dc.type	Article	en
dspace.entity.type	Publication
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person.identifier.orcid	0000-0002-9507-7451
person.identifier.other	43581
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