Kodeks zobowiązań – podstawa ciągłości i trwałości instytucji prawa cywilnego (w szczególności obligacyjnego) w Polsce
The Code of Obligations – the Basis for the Continuity and Permanence of the Institutions of the Civil Law (Especially the Obligation Law) in Poland

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to show the durability of private law institutions regulated by the 1933 Code of Obligations. The Code was formally in force until 1 January 1965. The enactment of the Code of Obligations was an important event in the law-making process in independent Poland. It was highly appreciated by legal theorists and practitioners. World War II interrupted further lawmaking in the then young country. After 1944, there were times of rejection of the principles of the market economy, including private-law tools of economic turnover. The institutions of the Code of Obligations were negated or subjected to various ideological experiments. Poland’s postwar legislation was modelled on the law of the Soviet Union. The Civil Code of 1964 introduced various types of property thereby distorting the classical construction of property rights. The command economy system used administrative decisions as a tool of economic turnover. Thus, it was an attempt to eliminate the contract and, above all, the fundamental principle of obligation law, which is the principle of freedom of contract. The same was done with the rebus sic stantibus clause. The principle of equity has been replaced by the principles of social intercourse with an explicitly ideological content. Extra-code regulations, i.e., regulations of a lower rank than the law establishing rules for conducting the economy within the privileged state property, were expanded. The political and economic crises in the People’s Republic of Poland increasingly indicated the unreasonableness of attempts to abandon the classical legal tools of legal transactions. It turned out that it was not possible to completely abandon the right of ownership in classical terms, also the contract as a regulator of legal transactions and many other legal constructions previously included in the Code of Obligations. After 1989, the regulations derived from this code and the Commercial Code became tools for the reconstruction of the economic and social system, that is, they fulfilled functions unusual to themselves, paving the way back to capitalism, a path that no state had previously gone through.

• Details
• Contents