EU private international law in internet-related disputes : The Polish case law approach

The paper examines the way Polish courts apply EU private international law (EU PIL) rules in the disputes concerning online context. The analysis seeks, in particular, to better understand the patterns recurring in the judicial reasoning and to map the typical circumstances of internet-related disputes pled before Polish courts. The paper attempts to cluster the existing case law and to trace the use made of EU PIL and CJEU decisions by Polish judges. It also aims to identify how the courts perceive specificity of internet-related disputes from the perspective of conflict of laws and how they understand specific goals of EU PIL (especially consumer protection). The text delves also into the cases where – despite encountering transnational elements – courts did not address conflict of laws issues. It attempts to indicate the most common instances of such omission and hence, to elucidate further the possible barriers to full application of EU PIL

The notary legal acts : de lege lata and de lege ferenda

The text attempts to conceptualize the possible reform of the procedure of making notarial deeds in Poland. It examines the feasibility of drafting and signing these deeds in the course of online communication between parties. The analysis builds on the significant constraints for the classic notarial procedure (based on paper documents and on the physical presence of a notary and parties) that were triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Its aim reaches, however, further beyond the present-day realities and seeks possible ways to generally modernize provisions on notarial deeds and to adjust them to the growing proliferation of online communication in the society. The text ascertains that the existing structure of provisions on notarial deeds already allows for making notarial deeds online, without profound legislative changes. It can be achieved predominantly by altering the attitude towards interpretation of these rules, especially through a more profound insight into the function of these provisions and the interrelation between their rationale and the features of the online communication. In the latter regards, the text makes an in-depth scrutiny of possible guarantees for communicational efficacy and for authenticity of notarial deeds that are provided by the advanced methods of transmitting and storing data online

Design status of ASPIICS, an externally occulted coronagraph for PROBA-3

The "sonic region" of the Sun corona remains extremely difficult to observe with spatial resolution and sensitivity sufficient to understand the fine scale phenomena that govern the quiescent solar corona, as well as phenomena that lead to coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which influence space weather. Improvement on this front requires eclipse-like conditions over long observation times. The space-borne coronagraphs flown so far provided a continuous coverage of the external parts of the corona but their over-occulting system did not permit to analyse the part of the white-light corona where the main coronal mass is concentrated. The proposed PROBA-3 Coronagraph System, also known as ASPIICS (Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun), with its novel design, will be the first space coronagraph to cover the range of radial distances between ~1.08 and 3 solar radii where the magnetic field plays a crucial role in the coronal dynamics, thus providing continuous observational conditions very close to those during a total solar eclipse. PROBA-3 is first a mission devoted to the in-orbit demonstration of precise formation flying techniques and technologies for future European missions, which will fly ASPIICS as primary payload. The instrument is distributed over two satellites flying in formation (approx. 150m apart) to form a giant coronagraph capable of producing a nearly perfect eclipse allowing observing the sun corona closer to the rim than ever before. The coronagraph instrument is developed by a large European consortium including about 20 partners from 7 countries under the auspices of the European Space Agency. This paper is reviewing the recent improvements and design updates of the ASPIICS instrument as it is stepping into the detailed design phase

Freedom of Contract on Crossroads: The Struggle over the Concept of Contract Liberty in 20th Century Poland

The text delves into the origins and theoretic premises of the concept of freedom of contract that developed in Poland throughout the 20th century. It attempts to provide a more precise understanding of the economic and political dynamics that led to creation of the quite strong laissez faire perception of contract liberty, which still seems to underpin most of the Polish discourses about contract law. In so doing, the article seeks to analyze two crucial dynamics that seem to be determinative for the current shape of freedom of contract in Poland: the direct translation of the inter-war model of contract liberty into the current civil law, as well as the rapidity and profoundness of the transformation from the centrally-steered to free market economy in the 1990s. This view on intellectual history of contract liberty is, in turn, applied to analyze frictions in transposition of EU contract law, which occur conspicuously in the Polish realities. </p

European Consumer Law after the New Deal: A Tryptich

Abstract In 2018/2019, EU private law experienced one of the most vigorous and meaningful changes in its evolution so far. The prominence of this alteration does not rest solely on the number of new rules, but—more importantly—on the substantially new perspective on economic and social tasks of European private law. The reform encompassed three core areas: consumer protection, sustainability and digital commerce. The paper seeks to better understand the transformative task of private law in the social and economic realm. The protection of the environment, on the one hand, and the informational autonomy and privacy, on the other, provide a new type of challenge for the existing agenda of private law, reaching beyond economic efficiency as its ultimate goal. Finally, the emergence of digitalization and sustainability as the new domains of private law reinvigorates the question of to what extent the European private law should directly engage itself in pursuing the social and economic agenda. The 2018/2019 legislation opened a new chapter in this discussion, facing private law with a new genre of tasks, which traditionally belonged to the domain of public ordering. The paper seeks to unpack the essence of this change by focusing on three intertwined issues: vulnerability, autonomy, and regulation. Mingled together they seem to form the backbone of the reform, which seems to provide an in-depth subversion of the existing conceptual structures of EU consumer law.</jats:p