Wpływ przepisów epizodycznych na praktykę specustaw

Abstract

This paper aims to show the impact of amending Principles of Legislative Drafting in 2015 by adding episodical provisions on the previous practice of the so-called special-bills. For the purpose of research, a special bill was defined as a bill that introduced extraordinary conditions in the Polish system of law by suspending (more or less precisely) functioning of existing (and not derogated) provisions. This definition is close to the legal definition of episodical provisions with only one difference – it doesn’t require a special bill to be temporary. By using formal legal dogmatic method, basic statistical methods, the paper conducted analysis of numbers of introduced special bills in particular terms of Polish Sejm, distribution of initiators of legislative process of special bills and growth of particular types of special bills, such as special investment bills or aid for strategic entities bills. These analyses led to the conclusion that introduction of episodical provisions in Principles of Legislative Drafting didn’t limit special bills practice in any way – on the contrary, it may be argued that it contributed to their expansion. The best example of the growth in importance of special bills is the fact that the Polish legislator decided that whole legislation aimed at fighting COVID-19 pandemic will be based on a special bill which contains numerous episodical provisions.

Keywords

• Incidental legislation
• episodical provisions
• special bills
• Principles of Legislative Drafting
• lawmaking