Polish civil judges as European Union law judges: knowledge, experiences and attitudes

The study seeks to provide a better understanding of the way civil judges of lower courts in Poland – a relatively new Member States of the EU - behave in the context of EU law and, moreover, to explain how the national judges adapt to the new legal circumstances created by the law of the European Union. For that purpose, the study examines the way national judges approach the law of the European Union by providing empirical, that is to say quantitative and qualitative data gathered among Polish private law judges of lower courts. The respective data was collected by means of a questionnaire distributed among the respective judges and semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with them. The present study is a descriptive attempt at evaluating and explaining what is actually happening in the Polish civil courts in the context of EU law application and more precisely how and why national judges participate in the process of legal integration within the European Union. For the foregoing purpose, the study focuses on three a priori established set of problems which relate to the knowledge of EU law and of the mechanisms of its application among national judges, the daily experiences of judges with the application of EU law and their personal attitudes towards the law of the European Union and the new role it imposes on them and the Union itself. The three clusters of variables are scrutinized in a broader institutional and operational legal context of the daily judicial functioning. In that sense, the study first establishes the formal, legal context in which the judges function and respectively it focuses on the way judges personally construct the EU legality, the way they perceive and understand their function as EU law judges and the way they experience the law of the European Union in the daily practice. By and large, the book offers a contextual and nuanced approach to the problem of operation of EU law in the national legal order.