Abstract

This article is devoted to the question of the precedence of the 1815 ConstitutionPolish 1815 of the Kingdom of Kingdomof Poland 1815–1830. The paper has been divided into three major parts.In the first, introductory part the origins of the 1815 ConstitutionPolish 1815 are discussed. This part of the article presents the current state of the art of the polish legal history concerning the genesis of this highest normative act of the 1815–1830 Polish Kingdom. Following the explanations provided by of S. Askenazy, H. Izdebski, D. Nawrot and S. Smolka, it has been expounded that the idea of a Constitution for a semi-independent Polish Kingdom was conceptualised as a propaganda instrument in the intellectual tug of war between France and Russia over the Polish society during the Napoleonic Wars. The Constitution itself had been being elaborated since 1811 with the participation of various polish politicians of the pro-Russian party, including F. K. Drucki-Lubecki, Franciszek Ksawery, M. K. Ogiński, Michał Kleofas, L. Plater, Ludwik and prince A. Czartoryski, Adam. After the ground-breaking victory of the sixth Alexander I Romanov, Russian Tsar Romanov over the French forces, it became a founding stone of the newly re-established Polish Kingdom.In the next part of the this short study, the main regulations of the Polish 1815 Constitution have been outlined, with the special focus on those regulations which pertain to the precedence of Constitution and to the criminal law.The third main part of the article discusses the issue of the supremacy of the 1815 ConstitutionPolish 1815 with reference to its relationship with the ordinary legislation adopted in the Polish Kingdom. It has been illustrated with an analysis of legislative process of the only fully-fledged codification of the entire branch of law which succeeded in being adopted by the Parliament of the Kingdom of Parliamentof the Kingdom of Poland 1815–1830: the Criminal Code of 1818. Those parliamentary debates have so far not been analysed more extensively in the literature of the subject. The speeches held by the polish deputies to Sejm of the year 1818 explicitly corroborate that a rhetorical argument of a Constitutional/unconstitutional law or conversely, congruence with the 1815 ConstitutionPolish 1815, was widely invoked by both the supporters and opponents of the project. This striving for coherence of the to-be-legislated normative act with the Constitution was also reflected in the adopted legal text of the Code itself, which was to a great extent compatible with the stipulations of the 1815 ConstitutionPolish 1815. Thus, this short investigation leads to the conclusion that at this point of the development of the Polish constitutional discourse it can be stated that ground-breaking idea of the supremacy of the Constitution was already clearly recognised.