The Individual in Interaction with the State Apparatus in the Perspective of the Penal Law of the Second Polish Republic: Remarks on Coercing a Public Official to Undertake or Desist from an Official Act
The Individual in Interaction with the State Apparatus in the Perspective of the Penal Law of the Second Polish Republic: Remarks on Coercing a Public Official to Undertake or Desist from an Official Act

Summary/Abstract: The paper is devoted to the offence of coercing a public official to undertake or desist from an official act in the Second Polish Republic. This offence closely related to the resistance to authority and constituted one of the specific offences that an individual could commit while interacting with the state apparatus. Its particular significance lay in the fact that it was not so much about hindering the performance of duties or influencing the content of official acts, but rather about the very existence of those act. Moreover, it was, after the insult to the authorities and their representatives, the most frequently committed crime against the authorities in the Second Polish Republic. The article presents the legal status composed of regulations from post-partition criminal codes in force in the Second Polish Republic: the Austrian code (1852), the German code (1871), the Russian code (1903), and the Polish code (1932), as well as the views of jurisprudence and doctrine. In addition, the practice of applying the provisions of the 1932 Penal Code related to the subject offence by the Regional Court in Kraków during the interwar period has been analysed. The source material, apart from printed sources in the form of normative acts or court rulings, consists of the case files of the Regional Court in Kraków from 1932-1939, stored in the National Archives in Kraków. The methods used in the research: historical, dogmatic, comparative, and empirical methods.

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