Judicial populism in the application of the law and the right to an impartial court

Abstract

In my paper I analyze the phenomenon of populism present in the field of law appli-cation. First, I reconstruct the concept of populism on the basis of the achievements of political science and law. Then, using the achievements of modern Polish theory and philosophy of law, I reconstruct the possible spaces for populist argumentation in the sphere of law application. Using the examples of decisions made by the Constitutional Tribunal, I point to specific argumentative strategies based on populist schemes, in order to finally point to tools enabling heuristics and polemics with such argumentation.