Authors

Discussion

Since the transformation of 1989 Polish judges were hardly activist. They primarily adjudicated cases with reference to national law and were generally weary of the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence (Dembour & Krzyzanowska-Mierzewska, 2004). To protect themselves from accusations of political interference and telephone justice, which were a commonplace during the socialist regime (Hendley, 2009; Ledeneva, 2008) they locked themselves in an ivory tower of formal legalism (Galligan & Matczak, 2007). With the attacks on judicial independence following the democratic backsliding in Poland something radically changed. What explains this rapid surge in activism? Drawing on a five-months qualitative fieldwork in Poland, interviews with judges, human rights lawyers and social activists, I theoretically position these developments within the relational legal consciousness paradigm (Chua & Engel, 2019). This paper demonstrates that judicial activism, as a site of legal consciousness production, emerges not only from the variety of interactions and relationships the judges engage with (‘relational embeddedness’, Li, 2016) as a result of the ‘communities of meaning’ the judges co-produce with social activists and human rights lawyers (Tungnirun, 2018). I propose that ‘the porosity of boundaries’ (Chua & Engel, 2019): 347) extends also to seeing ‘both law and politics as social relations and practices’ (Boukalas, 2013). While scholars of legal consciousness have long advocated that perceptions of law are ‘moulded by political culture’ (Hertogh & Kurkchiyan, 2016), the explicit acknowledgment of law-politics relation allows for a more nuanced and fine-grained understanding of the democratic backsliding as a catalyst of changes within the Polish judicial profession.