Interpretative and Limited Judgments in the Jurisprudence of the Constitutional Tribunal

Abstract

The article discusses interpretative and limited judgments in the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Tribunal in Poland. These judgments are of great significance in the judicial control of law’s conformity to the Constitution. They were distinguished following the departure from the original, dichotomic division of the Constitutional Tribunal’s judgments into those deciding the full and unambiguous consistency or inconsistency of an act with the Constitution. The article defines interpretative and limited judgements, and describes their roles and functions. An interpretative judgement is a decision in which the Constitutional Tribunal decides the conformity or non-conformity of a relevant act to the Constitution in its given interpretation. Its aim is not to eliminate non-uniformity or divergence in the interpretation of legal regulations, but to eliminate from all potential interpretative variants of a relevant act the one that is inconsistent with the Constitution. A limited judgement is a decision in which the Constitutional Tribunal decides the conformity or non-conformity of an act to the Constitution in a specific (subjective, objective or time) scope of its application. A limited judgement aims to decide whether a legal regulation whose interpretation is unambiguous, is consistent with the Constitution in a given scope of its application. The article also describes advantages and disadvantages of interpretative and limited judgements, accounting for the relevant views in the doctrine and jurisprudence in this respect, and examines the number of these judgements against the general number of judgements concerning the constitutionality of law that were passed by the Constitutional Tribunal in recent years.