The Concepts of Jan Kopczyński, President of the Supreme Administrative Tribunal, Regarding the Formation of the Council of State in the Second Polish Republic

Abstract

The paper focuses on a proposal to reform the lawmaking process in the Second Polish Republic through the establishment of a Council of State. The idea of creating a Council of State to improve the quality of legislation was widespread among the Polish legal elite of that time; many representatives of the legal profession presented their ideas in various periodicals. Particularly prominent among the supporters of this concept was the president of the Supreme Administrative Tribunal, Jan Kopczyński, who submitted for discussion by his fellow lawyers several proposals he had prepared for the establishment the Council of State. The paper describes the debate over Kopczyński’s proposals by juxtaposing them with the concepts of other representatives of the legal doctrine of the Second Polish Republic and the solutions that were applied by the government in that period. The ideas for the creation of the Council of State focused on two foreign models. The first was the French Conseil d'État, which combined legislative and administrative-court powers. The second model was the Romanian Legislative Council, whose tasks were strictly limited to legislation, without the administrative-court functions. Jan Kopczyński’s concepts were closer to the Romanian model. Kopczyński submitted three proposals to establish a Council of State, but none of his proposals was implemented. A substitute for the Council of State was to be the Legal Council to the Minister of Justice, established in 1926 by a regulation of the President of the Republic, but it quickly ended its activities encountering both reluctance of the parliament and a frigid reception by the ruling elite. The fact that the Council of State was never established, although it enjoyed widespread approval in the legal community, proves that politics always has the upper hand in a clash with legal idealism.