The Supreme Administrative Tribunal on Civil Status Records. A Case Law Review

Abstract

In interwar Poland, civil status records were kept under five separate legal regimes, which the Second Polish Republic inherited from the different partitioning powers. Only the Prussian and Hungarian systems, which were in force in the western voivodeships and in Spiš and Orava, were fully secular and professional. In the central, eastern, and southern voivodeships, the civil status records of the majority of the population were combined with church records, and thus were kept by the clergy. The cluster of outdated regulations, which were ill-adapted to the new state and were often mutually exclusive, caused a host of registration problems in each of the five systems in operation. Due to the unsuccessful attempts to unify this system throughout the country, efforts were made to organize it not only through legislation and ministerial circulars, but also through court judgments, including those issued in the administrative court system. The present paper analyzes eight judgments of the Supreme Administrative Tribunal that have been published in the official Collection of Judgments, as well as four rulings of the Tribunal presented in other sources on civil status records and related issues. The resulting overview is intended to present how the various provisions on civil status records were interpreted in the conditions prevailing in interwar Poland, as well as to illuminate the nature of the cases considered and their relevance in terms of their impact on further operation of the civil status records system.