The article discusses the part played by collective memory in the current threat to the rule of law in Poland. The starting point is the concept of commemorative lawmaking and a critical discussion of the use of the concept of memory laws in recent scholarship. An analysis of framing operations performed by PiS memory politics offers examples of how the notion of commemorative lawmaking can be deployed in order to explore techniques of legal governance of memory, including bricolage (illustrated by the case of Polish Constitution of 1997), retouch (exemplified by recent reform of Polish judiciary) and re-stylization (analysis based on the Act on National Institute of Remembrance of 2018). The article concludes with an exploration of the intrinsic connection between the threat to the rule of law in Poland and memory politics of the current Polish government, accompanied by a discussion of possible further developments in the field of law and memory studies.

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On 22 October 2020, the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland ruled that an abortion due to foetal impairment was unconstitutional. This article discusses the context of this controversial ruling as well as its main tenets, focusing on the interpretation of the human rights proffered by the Tribunal and on the rule of law concerns raised by the Tribunal’s decision. Against the backdrop of a brief history of the legal regulation of abortion in Poland since 1945, the article offers a critical assessment of the human rights framework used in the Polish abortion debate. Based on a close reading of the Tribunal’s ruling and the dissenting opinions, the article points out the particularities in the Tribunal’s engagement with international law and human rights jurisprudence. The article argues that the Tribunal’s decision is yet another symptom of the crisis in which the rule of law in Poland has found itself since 2015. It bears evidence to the closing of the jurisprudential horizon caused by the political change which has been taking place in Poland since 2015, consisting of the reduction of the role of international human rights debates as a reference in Polish constitutional jurisprudence. The ruling is therefore a portent of Poland’s future compliance with its international commitments in human rights matters.