Autorytarne formy władzy a realizacja prawa do cywilnoprawnej ochrony prawnoprocesowej przez obywateli w okresie PRL

The study describes the functions of civil procedure as a legal instrument from the times of the socialist authoritarian state of the People’s Republic of Poland. The positions expressed in the doctrine regarding the purpose and principles of conducting civil proceedings, regulated in the Act of 16 November 1964, Code of Civil Procedure, which was adopted during the authoritarian power of the dominant political party of the Polish United Workers’ Party, were presented. Provisions of procedural law, dating back to the authoritarian rule of democratic socialism in the People’s Republic of Poland, were intended to provide protection for the socialized economy and to enable the state to control civil-law relations. Civil proceedings were intended to guarantee the possibility of protecting not only the rights of the individual, but also, or rather first and foremost, of the units of the socialized economy, as well as of the disputes that might arise in connection with relations between the state and its citizens, and between citizens. This principle required the authorities conducting civil proceedings to ensure adequate legal and procedural protection in the event that a party or participant in the proceedings was a unit of the socialized economy. Civil proceedings in which the court, within its powers, could interfere with the legal sphere of an individual in connection with the conferral of discretionary power, was another legal tool and instrument allowing the state to influence private-law relations. In addition, the authoritarianism of the state power at that time was also manifested in this.

Compensatory justice to the victim of a crime and judicial practices in India: An empirical study

The Constitution of India guarantees that justice shall be delivered to all. The duty to ensure that justice delivery is accessible to all is entrusted to state bodies. The legislature is expected to ensure that the legal framework is there, the executive is expected to ensure that all infrastructural needs of the justice delivery system are in place, and the judiciary is expected to ensure that justice is delivered in their area. This paper deals with the issue of delivery of victim justice, with a special focus on compensatory mechanisms laid down under the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973. The Code empowers the courts to award compensation to the victim of a crime to ensure his/her rehabilitation. In light of the observations made by the Supreme Court of India that the trial court judges do not exercise their discretionary power under the relevant statutory provisions to award compensation to the victims of a crime, this paper explores the extent of such failure and the reasons behind it.

Probation Officers, Discretion, and Participatory Management

Probation officers (POs) are perhaps the correctional workers with the greatest reach, since more people are under probation supervision relative to every other correctional branch (i.e., jail, prison, and parole). The individuals under probation supervision and the community-at-large depend on POs to do their job well. However, POs have a job that requires them to make numerous decisions within an organization with conflicting goals and ambiguous roles, often with great discretionary power and little oversight. This relatively autonomous discretionary power often produces racial disparities in probation outcomes, the misuse of evidence-based tools such as risk and needs assessments, and ultimately the inability of probation organizations to effectuate change. These effects have negative consequences for probation organizations, probationers, and POs themselves. Participatory management produces an organizing framework that calls for hierarchical organizations to take a balanced approach to decision-making by increasing information sharing throughout the organizational hierarchy. This organizational structure carries the potential to remedy these aforementioned problems. By increasing oversight and accountability for POs via participatory management, POs’ discretionary power may be managed without limiting decision-making. Participatory management may create additional benefits such as increasing the efficiency of probation organizations, improving client outcomes for probationers, and increasing occupational satisfaction for POs. There are numerous potential threats to participatory management and several solutions for overcoming them. The main solution calls on probation agencies to make participatory management as effective as possible by constructing an equal balance between a loosely and tightly coupled organizational implementation of policies and practices.

Claiming for recovery of funds and (or) property of others: search for legislative compromise and review of law enforcement practice

In the light of extremely low level of enforcement of court decisions in Ukraine, the formation of effective legal instruments of coercive judgment enforcement measures is getting particularly important. One of the most effective ways to protect the interests of the claimant, which increases the effectiveness of execution of a court decision of a property nature and expands the possibilities of enforcement proceedings, is to claim for recovery of money and (or) property of others. This legal institution allows the enforcement of money and (or) property of another person who is not a party to the enforcement proceedings, but either holds the property or has a debt to the debtor. The article describes the issue of legislative uncertainty of the procedural status of another person whose property and (or) funds are being recovered and formulates ways to resolve it. A number of collisions between the Civil and Commercial Procedural Codes and the Law of Ukraine “On Enforcement Proceedings” were revealed in terms of legal regulation of the institution of claim for recovery of property of others, in particular in terms of seizure of funds of a person in debt to the debtor. It is proposed to resolve the identified collisions in favor of procedural codes. The legal nature of the arrest, which is imposed on the money of another person in the recovery procedure, is determined. On the example of case law, the discretionary power of the court in considering claims for recovery of funds of a person who owes money to the debtor are analyzed, and the incompleteness of the legislative list of grounds for refusal to satisfy the application for recovery is stated. Attention is drawn to the imperfection of the procedural codes in terms of regulating the possibility to appeal to Court of Appeal and Court of Cassation judgements issued as a result of consideration of claims for recovery of funds of a person who has debts to the debtor. Through the prism of law enforcement practice, the subject of proof in the consideration of applications for recovery of funds of persons who have debts to the debtor and clarifies the distribution of the burden of proof in this category of cases.

Political Budget Cycles in Public Revenues: Evidence From Fines

This article seeks to ascertain whether local governments make improper use of their discretion and use pecuniary sanctions for electoral purposes. To this end, a sample of Spanish municipalities with a population of more than 1,000 citizens during the period 2010 to 2016 has been used. Our results show that revenues from fines are influenced by the presence of elections. In particular, we find that local governments in an election year reduce the percentage of fines, measured either over total non-financial revenues or in per capita terms. This reduction, compared to the pre-election year, suggests that politicians use their discretionary power to issue fewer fines in election years, as they are aware that penalties are not well-regarded by citizens. In addition, we find that the most indebted municipalities, those governed by right-wing parties and the most fragmented municipalities tend to collect more revenues from fines in the pre-election year. Finally, other factors influencing revenues from fines are the number of inhabitants of the municipality, the sources of external funding that the local government has, the ideology of the rulers and their political strength.

Identification methods and indicators of important patents

PurposeThis study aims to find technologically important patent identification methods and indicators early and efficiently to grasp the technical qualitative level of patents, which are output indicators of research and development (R&D) results.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reports on two methods for distinguishing important patents and the indicators obtained from those methods. One of the discrimination methods is Heckman's two-step estimation procedure. The second method is to find the centrality of each patent by network analysis of the citation relationship between publications and to find the importance from the magnitude of the centrality value.FindingsIn Heckman's analysis, the number of citations within three years after publication and the applicant's right acquisition/maintenance motivation index had positive effects on patent importance. The discriminative indicators of important patents by network analysis were degree centrality, mediation centrality, proximity centrality and transit values in the aggregated subnetworks. These two analytical methods are in a relationship that can complement each other's shortcomings. To efficiently evaluate the qualitative importance of patents, it is recommended to use these two methods together.Research limitations/implicationsThe indicators of important technical patents might change depending on the technical field. Future studies can apply this research to multiple technical fields to improve robustness and to construct an algorithm that can efficiently evaluate the quality of patents.Practical implicationsThis study's results can be useful for grasping the patent position of the company or competitors numerically and for quantitatively evaluating the quality of R&D activities. Furthermore, it is possible to streamline the routine for an exploratory search of a huge number of patents. For example, it could be useful for detecting changes in the paradigm of specific technical knowledge, evolving the genealogy of technical knowledge and creating patent maps for new R&D. These methods greatly increase the effectiveness of technical knowledge information, which is the basis of R&D. In addition, the results of this study can help in evaluating patented assets.Social implicationsThis study confirmed the development process of technical knowledge. It is a fact that sharing, sympathy and mutual trust for technical issues and technical values are created among professional engineers and researchers inside and outside the organization, and their preferences and interactions develop and expand technical knowledge. Understanding the process of development and the evolution of this technical knowledge gives hints, such as expanding the discretionary power of engineers and researchers regarding corporate secrets, or reviewing the balance between control and independence, to solve Japanese management problems, which are often closed and monetized in R&D activities.Originality/valueThis study presents a scoring of the technical significance of patents by combining the two analytical methods. In addition, there are proposals as a method for detecting changes in the genealogy and paradigm of technical knowledge. As an analysis method, it is a new proposal that has never existed before.

The Judiciary Power of Discretion in Sanctioning the Facilitation of Unauthorised Stay in Poland

Migration control in Poland is significantly based on internal control practices carried out by street-level bureaucrats representing both law enforcement agents and low-level judges equipped with discretionary power. Based on empirical data from 243 criminal cases of facilitating unauthorised stay in Poland, we reflected on how the mentioned actors and, in particular, criminal judges interpret the existing provisions and to what extent they study cases independently or simply follow the logic of the law enforcement. We based our analysis on two distinct forms of identified cases of ‘supporting’ irregular migration; that is, participation in sham marriages and involvement in document fraud. We conclude that judges lacking expertise in the field relatively new to them may be less prone to question the effects of the preparatory proceedings, and they are not keen to look for any answers for themselves, especially to scrutinise and refer to the European Union law or jurisprudence. In their ‘craftwork’, they face cases that seem similar to them and, thus, not deserving of special attention. Judges lack the broader knowledge and possibly also reflexive thinking in assessing migration-related criminal cases brought to the courts by border guards, who prove their effectiveness inter alia through numbers of detected facilitators, not necessarily the roles played by them. All this may lead to unnecessarily broadening the scope of control over immigrants and a failure in achieving the objectives of criminal provisions.

Terrorism and emergency constitutions in the Muslim world

Previous research has indicated that constitutionalized emergency provisions effectively constrain the behaviour of democratic governments subsequent to terrorist attacks. In this article, we ask if this is also true for autocratic governments. Are non-democratic governments equally subject to constitutionalized constraints regarding their reactions to emergencies and particularly to terrorist attacks? To answer the question, we analyse the behaviour of a specific group of predominantly autocratic governments that are particularly subject to frequent terrorist incidents, namely the states that are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Employing data on terrorist activity from the Global Terrorism Database and constitutional data from the Index of Emergency Powers, we estimate the association between constitutionalized constraints and terrorist attacks in a dataset covering 48 member-states of the organization observed annually between 1970 and 2014. As hypothesized, we find that emergency constitutions that politically make it relatively cheap for governments to declare a state of emergency are more likely to be invoked. In addition, we find that governments are more likely to increase repression after terrorist events when the constitution allocates more discretionary power to the government in emergencies. Our evidence thus suggests that emergency constitutions also impact on the behaviour of largely autocratic governments.