Principles of Positivist Jurisprudence in the Teachings of Warsaw Lawyers of the First Third of the XIX Century

The article is devoted to the extremely rich and insufficiently studied heritage of Polish legal thought. The political and geographical determinants of the chosen research topic are the restoration of statehood in central Polish lands in 1807 (Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland) and the defeat of the November Uprising (1830-1831) followed by measures taken by the Russian authorities to limit the autonomy of the Kingdom of Poland. The intellectual milestones are the founding of the School of Law in 1807 (later the Faculty of Law of the University of Warsaw), and the closure of the University of Warsaw in 1831, as well as the significant emigration of scientists in the same year and the liquidation of the Society of Friends of Science in 1832. The intellectual milestones are also European (and first of all Central European) processes of legal thought evolution in the second half of the XVIII – first third of the XIX century, which led to the formation of the first and still insufficiently understood and studied positivism in jurisprudence, being a profound phenomenon that reveals the essence of positivism in legal thought in general. The study found that the basic principle of jurisprudence in the vision of most Warsaw scholars during the study period was its independence from a priori and metaphysical philosophizing, and vice versa, the formation of its own philosophical and legal discourse (philosophy of positive law) based on generalization and understanding of research results. It was recognized that legal science should be a fundamentally new system of legal knowledge – positivist and social. Recognizing the historical and modern pluralism of such an organization of knowledge, Warsaw scholars have unequivocally identified themselves with the Central European jurisprudence, the core of which is the German. Warsaw scholars believed that jurisprudence was based on historical, dogmatic and philosophical approaches. Accordingly, they considered three relatively separate areas of scientific knowledge, which together can be considered as a single legal science or a system of interrelated legal sciences. Depending on the emphasis in the views of scholars on the fundamental or applied side of legal science, this system was seen differently, as well as the subject of jurisprudence – universal or more national. It can be argued that this to some extent correlated with the predominance in the views of certain scholars of the principles of historical-philosophical or historical schools.