About the Concept of the Secondary Unconstitutionality of Law

The concept of the secondary unconstitutionality of law has been appearing over the years in the adjudication of the Polish courts, adjudication of the Constitutional Tribunal and in legal literature. During this time there have been diversified contexts, in which this notion has been used. Shortly after the Constitution from 1997 entered into force, ‘secondary unconstitutionality’ was used to describe an influence of the new constitution on a so-called pre-constitutional law. Nowadays the tendency of understanding this concept is different. On the one hand, it specifies the law, which is a result of a faulty, repeating unconstitutional regulations, activity of the legislator. On the other hand, this notion is used in the situation, when as the consequence of the entry into force a judgment of the Constitutional Tribunal the new law is also unconstitutional. The aim of this article is to propose a comprehensive definition of the concept of the secondary unconstitutionality. Moreover, it will be presented a draft of the sense of this notion for the practice of establishing and applying the law in Poland.

Climate change, the global pandemic, economic crisis and worldwide social unrest create uneasy and challenging environment for business to operate. These processes also add a new dimension to the debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR), that since at least the middle of the 20th century has been growing in importance and gradually became a permanent component of the reformulated business-society relations lexicon. The aim of the article is to outline ambiguous nature of CSR and to examine the theoretical possibilities of relating the constitutional norms of modern democratic states to this complex social problem, in particular in the context of such issues as application of the constitution, constitutional clauses, the vertical and horizontal effect of constitutional norms, constitutional rights and obligations.