Can Informative Traffic Signs Also Be Obligatory? Polish Constitutional Tribunal and Supreme Court Versus Traffic Signs

Abstract

This article discusses a rare instance of the highest national courts explicitly addressing traffic signs in their judgments or decisions. It critically examines the standpoint expressed by the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court, according to which the basic traffic sign categories in Polandobligatory, prohibitory, informative and warning-are not separable (not disjunctive) [e.g. prima facie non-normative signs (informative or warning) can also be normative (obligatory or prohibitory)]. These courts formulated this idea when addressing the legal question concerning the applicability of legal provision penalizing failure to comply with a traffic sign to parking a car without paying a fee in an area marked by an informative sign that indicates the need to charge a fee for parking. The article analyses and criticizes the relevant standpoint of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court. It shows how many negative consequences can result from frivolous treatment and neglect of traffic signs. It also reconstructs some possible practical recommendations concerning not only traffic signs but also visualizations of legal rules in general.

Basic Level Categorisation and the Law

“…This visual form of communicating normativity has been dubbed "graphic rules" and "pictorial law" ([9], p. 124). It poses interesting theoretical problems that can be discussed from a number of scientific perspectives, including legal theory, semiotics, philosophy of language, neuropsychology, and others (see, for example, [9,11,22]). For our purposes, only one theoretical problem is relevant, namely the relation between the visual content of the sign and its linguistic description provided in a legal act.…”

“…The practical significance of the signs in question may be questioned on the ground that they are warning signs, traditionally believed to be non-normative (as opposed to obligatory and prohibitory signs) (see [11], p. 772, [9], pp. 125-126).…”

“…Firstly, there is the problem of discrepancy between the visualisation of a rule and its verbal description. In the literature of the subject, high emphasis is placed on the necessary correspondence between visualisation and description: "when it comes to suggestions concerning the visualization of law in general (…), it seems that anyone who actually wants to visualize some rule should not include in its description anything that would go beyond what is actually visualized" ( [11], p. 783). Such statements obviously do not take into account the phenomenon discussed in this article, namely the impossibility of visualising superordinate categories by means of a single image.…”

“…They provide flexibility and all-inclusiveness of legal categories at the cost of indeterminacy and vagueness. In fact, many of the famous (or infamous) interpretive cases, both hypothetical and real, are concerned with superordinate terms, such as "vehicle", 10 "live animal", 11 "labour of any kind", 12 "to use", 13 etc. The vertical dimension of prototype theory offers a very convincing and intuitive explanation why this is.…”

“…662-672,[34]). See also the real case: McBoyle v. United States, 283 U.S.25 (1931), where the question was whether a 1919 federal statute prohibiting interstate transportation of a stolen "vehicle" applies to airplanes 11. See the discussion about the hypothetical "No live animals on the bus" rule in: ([35], p. 533,[41], pp.…”