Smolak Marek, The Culture of Justification and Public Reason: Comments on the Motion of Members of the Polish Parliament to the Constitutional Tribunal

The question of limits of public authority is one of the most important issues faced by modern liberal democracy. In legal philosophy, this issue was dominated by Ronald Dworkin’s critique of legal positivism, in which he rejected the view that the enactment of a law by an authority is sufficient for its legitimization. For Dworkin, a law is legitimate if it protects the standards of liberal morality and therefore has moral value . Of course, court judgments based on the standards of liberal democracy cannot be regarded as easy. In pluralistic societies even the people who are open to compromise and use common sense for solving problems may find themselves in fundamental disagreement with others regarding political or moral grounds for making decisions . If this is the case, we should perhaps accept that in a liberal democracy which tolerates different viewpoints a court decision can be simultaneously justified and unjustified and that from time to time many of us will disagree with a...