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According to communist doctrine, law is an element of class rule. It belongs to the so-called superstructure, alongside such concepts as the state, power and coercion. Its content and functions are determined by the so-called base, that is, conditions of economic production. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, there is the famous expression that law is the will of the ruling class elevated to the dignity of an act. From this came the assumption that the rightness of the law, its legitimacy, depended only on its origin from the proper, that is, revolutionary power. Such doctrinal assumptions resulted in the depreciation of the process of law-making in socialism; important was the fact of its connection with revolutionary power. Law in socialism was not intended to be a long existing entity, as it served for transformations towards the achievement of a communist regime. The subject of this text is the process of law-making in socialist Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The author will focus on the Polish example mainly, with which he is most familiar, and will limit himself to general remarks relating to the other two countries. The rejection of the tripartite division of power in the socialist system was to be expressed in the dominance of parliament as the body expressing the will of the working people. In theory, this was to mean the dominance of acts over decrees. In practice, it was different – socialist power bypassed parliament, abusing the form of decree. Among other things, this was how the fiction of public consultation on draft legislation manifested itself. A certain phenomenon was the process of creating codes: for example, the so-called legal bicentennial in Czechoslovakia (1949–1950) or the Codification Commission (1956–1969) in Poland. This text will pay attention to activities aimed at ensuring the proper legislative level of legal acts. In this context, the views of Adam Podgórecki will be discussed as distinguished by an originality unparalleled in other socialist countries.

Well-defined and effective political accountability for decisions taken by politicians determines public trust in government and promotes effective, accountable, and fair public governance. Political responsibility encompasses almost all types of responsibility: civil, criminal, constitutional, disciplinary, and moral responsibility. The author is of the opinion that, despite the fact that the liability of politicians is possible in Lithuania, the legal regulation is nevertheless insufficient and must be improved. The article emphasizes that it would be appropriate to establish the direct liability of politicians in Lithuania for decisions that are clearly inaccurate, irresponsible, and/or taken in the wrongful discharge of their duties. It is likely that an improved legal framework would ensure a better quality of decision taken, and would pay more attention to the possible impact assessment and analysis of the decision (and the regulatory act) taken. It can also be assumed that the introduction of a regulation providing for the direct responsibility of politicians would also lead to a reduction in the number of legal acts adopted/amended, which is currently disproportionately high. Ensuring the accountability of politicians is crucial. Implementing the measures mentioned above would not only enhance their accountability, but also promote transparent decision-making, which is essential for maintaining public confidence in the government.

Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment. Way Down the Hole Video 1 (https://youtu.be/UuAB63fhge0) Way Down the Hole Video 2 (https://youtu.be/TwEuw1cTrcQ) Way Down the Hole Video 3 (https://youtu.be/bOcBv_UnHIs​) Way Down the Hole Video 4 (https://youtu.be/cx_l1S8D77c)

What scholars referred to as a climate change litigation 'explosion' in 2015 has today become an established movement which is unlikely to stop in the near future: worldwide, over a thousand lawsuits have been launched regarding responsibility for the dangers of climate change. Since the beginning of this trend in transnational climate litigation scholars have warned that the separation of powers is threatened where judges interfere with the politically hot issue of climate change. This article uses Jurgen Habermas's political theory on deliberative democracy to reconstruct the tension between law and politics generated by these lawsuits. This reconstruction affords a better understanding of the implications of climate change litigation: while the role of the judiciary as such remains unchanged, the trend is likely to influence the democratic legitimacy of judicial lawmaking on climate change, as it indicates an increasing realization that a sound environment is a constitutional value and is therefore a prerequisite for democracy.

This article examines the public presence of the Orthodox Church in Romania during the 1920s and considers the responses given by the Orthodox Church of Transylvania, a branch of Romanian Orthodoxy, to the challenges faced by postwar Romanian society. The article approaches this encounter from the point of view of the Orthodox articulation of the public role of the Church. By examining the legal and pastoral discourse of the Transylvanian Orthodox Church, it argues that its clergy and laity saw themselves as religious actors inspired by democratic ideals originating in the Christian Gospel. The article suggests that the Orthodox efforts to respond to the postwar moral crisis from the perspective of a democratic ecclesiology and liberal notion of religion challenge the monolithic and nationalistic view of interwar Romanian Orthodoxy.

The transition to renewable energy is strongly affected by legal regulation. To increase the efficiency of the introduction of renewable energy into the energy systems of component states of federations and accelerate the energy transition, it is necessary to carry out systematic work to improve regional legislation in this area. The purpose of this study was to analyze the current regulatory legal acts on the renewable energy of the regions of a number of countries such as the USA, Germany, India, Switzerland and Russia in order to form a universal list of issues that need regulation at the regional level. The main methods for achieving the objectives set in this study were the comparative legal method and the method of analysis and synthesis. As a result, a number of recommendations were developed describing how legal relations primarily need to be regulated by regional legislation, and examples of different approaches to their settlement were presented. The issues in need of legal regulation were divided into three groups according to the degree of importance of their regulation by the legislation of the component state of the federation. Further development of this study will be aimed at identifying the most effective industrial practices for resolving each of the issues included in the compiled list which will help improve the efficiency of regional legal regulation of renewable energy.

Does how Congress makes a law affect public approval ofthat law? This question has been little studied, but the rising use of unorthodox processes in Congress raises concerns about the perceived legitimacy of congressional action among the public. Utilizing two unique survey experiments, I present evidence that when people are aware of the use of unorthodox legislative processes they express lower levels of approval for new laws. This effect is especially pronounced among partisans already inclined to be in opposition to the law, further solidifying their opposition. These findings have important implications for a Congress that in recent years has increasingly turned to unorthodox legislative processes to pass legislation.

Is legislative power flowing to the executive branch over time? Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate delegation to the executive under different executive formats. Hypothesized causes include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a data set containing 2,020 country-year observations of democracies and semi-democracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive–legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are no less frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy maintains interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater ‘noise’ in the relationship.

For the past 15 years an enormous enterprise of global norm making and related national lawmaking has been underway in many areas of global commerce. This article shows that leading global institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations, are building an international financial architecture with law -- including corporate bankruptcy law -- as its foundation. Building on research on international institutions and three national cases (China, Indonesia, Korea), the authors propose a new framework for legal change in a global context -- the recursivity of law. They argue that the globalization of bankruptcy law has proceeded through three cycles: (1) at the national level through recursive cycles of lawmaking, (2) at the global level through iterative cycles of norm making, and (3) at the nexus of the two. Recursive cycles are driven by driven by four mechanisms -- the indeterminacy of law, contradictions, diagnostic struggles, and actor mismatch. Thus the recursivity of law both revives and expands the sociological theory of legal change and offers a basis for an integrated theory of globalization and law. Adapted from the source document.

On March 15, 2019, the National People’s Congress passed a long-anticipated Foreign Investment Law (FIL) after a short deliberation period of only three months. This expedited legislative process seems unusual, considering that the original draft of the FIL proposed by the Ministry of Commerce in January 2015 was tabled indefinitely after a brief period of public consultation. How can we explain this stark difference? Comparing the legislative processes and contents of the two laws, this paper shows that, as with many previous laws, bureaucratic politics likely contributed to an impasse in the 2015 draft, whereas external shocks—in this case, the escalating trade war between China and the United States—helped accelerate the deliberation process and the passage of the new FIL. These two cases demonstrate the durability of lawmaking institutions and procedures under Xi Jinping despite the recentralization of power in the executive after changes to the constitution.