Demons of the Past? Legal Survivals of the Socialist Legal Tradition in Contemporary Polish Private Law

The paper critically reflects on the dominant narrative of discontinuity with the state socialist past within legal culture by focusing on four examples of legal survivals of the period of actually existing socialism in Polish private law. What is characteristic for these four legal institutions is that despite their state socialist origin they are still being resorted to in practice after the transformation of 1989. This patent fact will serve as a basis to destabilize the dominant narrative about discontinuity in Polish legal culture: if legal institutions created under communist rule in Poland are still useful after the transformation, this period cannot be treated as a ‘legal black hole’ or ‘blackout’ of Polish legal history. To the contrary, any historical narrative of Polish legal culture should take the period of actually existing socialism into account, treating it al pari with any other period of reduced national sovereignty in Polish history. Despite the radically different foundations of the socio-economic system (actually existing socialism vs. capitalism), institutions of private law developed during the socialist period have proven to be useful today. This paradoxical feature of legal survivals — their capability of surviving a radical transformation from one system to another — allows to draw more general conclusions on legal survivals and legal culture, claiming that they are a normal, physiological feature of legal culture, rather than its pathology.