DESIGNATION OF JUDICIAL DOCUMENTS IN THE THIRD STATUTE OF LITHUANIA AND THE ATTRIBUTES OF THEIR EVOLUTION
ADAM STANKEVIČ
The author of the article analyses the designation of documents drawn up and issued by the court, their conception, field of application, and place in the court procedure as presented in the Third Statute of Lithuania (TSL). In addition, an attempt is made to exhibit the changes that such documents and their designations underwent in later centuries (until the end of the 18th c.) by means of the example of the Lithuanian Tribunal. The research revealed that documents which in the sources from different periods were referred to by the same name meant different things or were simultaneously attributed several meanings. In the 17th-18th century, only part of the terms featured in the Third Statute of Lithuania were used in the judicial practice of the Lithuanian Tribunal, and with time some of them were replaced with other terms. Several terms denoting summonses (pozew, mandat, zakaz) can be identified in the TSL, and all of them were in use until the very end of the 18th century. However, a single term – dekret / decretum – was used to designate the judgement (actually, for some time there was a differentiation between the court judgement and its procedural summary, but later the generalized term for the judgement prevailed). A number of documents in the TSL are referred to as the “open letter”, however, later some of them acquired specialised names (e.g. the power of attorney). With time, there were certain changes in the context in which some of the terms were used (e.g. the term “cedule” which in the 18th century was already consistently used exceptionally in a particular situation, namely when a litigant refused to obey the order of the court and informed in writing a judicial officer of such refusal) or the terms themselves underwent certain changes (in the 18th century the term membran was substituted with the term blankiet). Part of the judicial documents mentioned in the TSL disappeared in the long run or there was a certain decrease in their significance (this is true of the reminder and adjournment documents as well as glejt (protection letter)). The examples above suggest that the Lithuanian Tribunal would sometimes issue reminders and guarantee documents, though legal acts did not explicitly provide for that. The TSL offered a number of terms hardly related with the investigation of a case, therefore in the early 18th century, with the improvement of judicial procedures, they underwent rapid changes. The procedure of the implementation of a court ruling, which underwent significant changes, is accountable for the introduction of new terms, for example, with time several terms pertaining to the notification of the litigants were used simultaneously (obwieszczenie, innotescencyja, list tradycyjny). Most probably due to the unification processes observed in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, a number of Latin origin terms were introduced in the judicial practice of the GDL, e.g. cytacyja, decyzyja, innotestencyja, plenipotencyja, obdukcyja, wizyja, inkwizycyja, weryfikacyja, kalkulacyja, tradycyja (all of them had been used in Poland but were not featured in the TSL).
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