Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

Kazimierz Opałek, the author of the essays collected in this volume, belongs to leading contemporary legal philosophers. He was born in Kraków on July 13, 1918. Opałek began his legal studies at the Jagiellonian University in 1936. Until 1939, he completed three years; in 1938, he was appointed, still as a student, as a “younger assistant” in the Department of Roman Law. The war interrupted Opałek’s studies for some time. Finally, he graduated at the clandestine Jagiellonian University in 1944 and was appointed (1945) as an assistant, first in the Department of Legal History and later in the Department of Theory of Law and State, the latter was directed by Professor Jerzy Lande. Kazimierz Opałek obtained his JurD on the base of the dissertation on Hieronim Stroynowski, a Polish legal philosopher of the Enlightement. Immediately after the doctorate, Opałek began to work on his Habilitation dissertation. He finished an extensive monograph about the concept of subjective right in 1949, but this book could not be published at that time (it was published in 1957). Thus, he came back to the history of thought of Polish Enlightement and wrote a book on natural law in the writings Polish physiocrats. Opałek was promoted as professor in 1954 and in the same year became the successor of Lande who died. In 1977 he was elected as a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the International Academy of the History of Science and very actively participated in activities of the International Association of Legal and Social Philosophy; University of Pecs (Hungary) awarded him the honorary degree. He was also a distinguished teacher. Wiesław Lang (professor of legal philosophy in Toruń), Aleksander Peczenik (professor of legal philosophy in Lund), Krzysztof Grzegorczyk (professor of legal philosophy in Neuchâtel, Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki (professor of legal philosophy in Kraków) and myself belong to his students. Kazimierz Opałek died in Kraków on November 11, 1995.