Michal Peno

The aim of the article is to analyze the processes of anti-democratization as a violation of the idea of the rule of law in the context of changes and directions of criminal policy and criminal justice system, on the example of Polish legislation. Activity of the legislator in the field of criminal law was confronted with the liberal-democratic philosophy of criminal law, which searches for the justification for punitive repression in a social consensus, fair procedures for reaching an agreement, and democratic mechanisms, while maintaining the ideals of social and axiological pluralism. These are the limits of the recognition of criminal law as just. Anti-democratization means that limits are exceeded, which constitutes a precedent and a challenge for the contemporary philosophy of criminal law.

Certainly principles of criminal liability may be understood as rules or norms outlining orders or prohibitions and standing out among other norms with their weight, for legal culture, legal doctrine, etc. In such a classic approach they are norms defining basic rights and obligations in the applicable criminal law. However, is it the only possible and cognitively interesting meaning of the word “principle” in jurisprudence? From the semiotic point of view, they can occur in three forms: special-kind norms, teleological directives, rules which constitute valid performance of conventional activities. In an extra-directival sense these principles may be understood as models-descriptions of shaping the system of criminal law. From a theoretical and practical point of view principles addressed to the legislator are extremely weighty—they can be called rules constructing the system of criminal liability. These all problems are discussed in the article.

This text is a kind of sketch and presents some simple ideas. The aim of this article is to carry out a critical and reflexive analysis of Roman Ingarden's philosophy of responsibility. Being a member of the phenomenological current, Ingarden mainly studied the ontological bases or conditions of responsibility by identifying different situations of responsibility. In this paper situations of responsibility have been analysed in the semantic contexts in which the word "responsibility" appears. Legally, the prescriptive contexts of using the word "responsibility" are particularly important since they are usually either ignored or inadequately separated from descriptive contexts. Roman Ingarden's views were supplemented by Alf Ross's aspects of responsibility. As a result, the elementary ways of understanding responsibility have been reconstructed; they are the basis for reflections on moral responsibility as well as legal responsibility.