The Persistence of Legal Form Beyond the Unfolding of History: The Case of Legal Formalism

The article aims to investigate the part played by legal formalism in maintaining the continuity and coherence of the law. The legal formalism is reconstructed and analysed as one of the dominant, if not the dominant, perspectives on the law that substantially impacts the way in which the law operates. To further illustrate the part played, mechanisms enabling legal reproduction are discussed based on the examples drawn from Polish legal theory. The reconstruction of these examples serves as a basis for critiquing formalist tendencies in legal theory in general. Predominantly, the argument focuses on the concept of the law and the perception of its past construed on the basis of this concept. Elaboration of the process of abstraction that begets this concept elucidates the farther-reaching, socio-political consequences of the formalistic approach to the law.