Studia Prawnicze. Rozprawy i Materiały / Studies in Law: Research Papers

The paper is aimed at defending the following three claims: (1) that the objective value of privacy may change in time (as its significance is relative to concrete social context); (2) that in the contemporary world, in which the state’s and global corporations power to intrude upon our liberty, especially upon its variety called informational privacy, has become due to technological developments particularly strong, the need for protection of privacy has become especially urgent (given our attachment to the axiological fundamentals of liberal democracies), and therefore its objective value is very high; and (3) that in spite of this high objective value of privacy, it does not correspond to its subjective valuation by the ‘typical’ citizen of contemporary liberal democracies, who, if Byung-Chul Han’s picture of our society as ‘the burnout one’ is correct, has become mentally exhausted by overstimulation and overachievement, and for whom, consequently, the central value has become flatly understood happiness (as material comfort and security), rather than liberty and its constitutive part, which is the right to privacy.

The article discusses the legal aspects of the functioning of autonomous stores, i.e. stores in which modern technology allows shopping without the physical presence of staff in the facility. The Author tries to identify the most important legal problems related to the operation of autonomous stores, while indicating their possible solutions. The issues of protection of consumer rights in this type of stores, verification of age, sobriety and legal capacity of customers, as well as protection of consumers’ privacy and personal data in the context of the use of ‘intelligent’ monitoring systems will be discussed. 

The article discusses the impact of the growing involvement of artificial intelligence algorithms on taxation systems. It highlights the need to redefine tax systems in the context of allocating resources for public goods and compensating individuals excluded from the labor market due to automation. The article draws attention to the challenges in effectively taxing corporations that use AI, which generate significant revenue through licensing and commercialization of technology. It considers various concepts of granting legal personality to AI and the consequences of such a solution for tax regulation. The article also discusses legal regulations concerning tax obligations and methods of enforcing tax commitments.

In the paper the phenomenon of political deepfake was discussed, constituting the type of political deepfake deriving from original deepfake classification regarding to the aim. It was concluded, that currently functioning measures may be insufficient. The proposition of new potential type of illicit act was formulated, differentiating socially harmful deepfake from artistic deepfake.

Food safety, i.e. the quality of food products related to health protection, is no longer exclusively the domain of national law. After the establishment of the WTO, it can be said that it belongs to the area of international cooperation, which can be called global food safety management. The central place here is occupied by the joint body of FAO and WHO – the Codex Alimentarius Commission. Its standards are not soft law in the WTO regime because they were “hardened” in a framework of the agreement on the application of sanitary and phytosanitary measures. Taking this into account, it is worth considering the place of these standards in national legal systems. For this purpose, this article uses a comparison of Polish and Slovak regulations in the context of EU membership and, therefore, the EU food law. The conclusions stated that both Poland and Slovakia are obliged to incorporate Codex Alimentarius standards, which was forgotten by the national institutions of these countries. These standards are properly implemented within EU instruments, but this does not exempt countries from an appropriate approach to Codex Alimentarius, taking into account the existence of the Code. However, this is a problem both in the information and educational spheres.

The following paper attempts to discuss the specific features of the Constitutional Courts in Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The aim of the paper is to discuss their compliance or non-compliance with the Kelsenian model, widespread in European countries. The study asserts that the model of the Constitutional Courts in the abovementioned nations does not differ significantly from the Western European model. This is an important conclusion since the Central Asian countries are permanently classified as non-democratic. Thus, this raises a question about the sense of the existence of the Constitutional Courts in countries that do not respect the principle of the democratic rule of law. The answer to this question goes beyond the scope of the following study, but the indisputable conclusion of this article is that authoritarian states pay much attention to the normative aspect of the functioning of regimes and ensure the existence of façade institutions typical of democratic states.

The starting point for the discussion in this article is the principle of parliamentary representation, a cornerstone for any democratic society. This principle holds a key constitutional status within Polish law. To uphold and actualize this principle, the structure of the parliamentary mandate and the mechanisms designed to protect it are of utmost importance. Immunity protection offers members of parliament the freedom to execute their duties without interference. A limited set of criteria for the revocation of a parliamentary mandate ensures the integrity of the mandate to represent voters, acquired through the electoral process. This approach also safeguards against the arbitrary removal of a representative’s formal legitimacy to act on behalf of the nation. The central thesis of this article is that any unlawful termination of a parliamentary mandate through a flawed process constitutes a direct assault on the very foundation of democracy: the nation’s right to freely elect its representatives.

The author describes the institution of conversion of court proceedings to arbitration, which was added to the Code of Civil Procedure in 2023. The article identifies the advantages and disadvantages of this solution both dogmatically and from the perspective of time and financial efficiency for business. The author also poses the question of the impact of the introduction of conversion on the popularisation of arbitration in Poland. Moreover, whether only the initiative of the legislator and the executive power has an impact on the promotion of the idea of arbitration.