XVIII amžiaus studijos / The Eighteenth Century Studies

The article sets out to discuss the reform of the courts of the nobility in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania carried out by the Four-Year Sejm (1788–1792). The author makes use of the instructions issued to the delegates to the Four-Year Sejm, as well as the laws passed by the Sejm itself, to present castle, land and border courts, as well as the Lithuanian Tribunal and their reorganisation, as a result of which new institutions operating on a more modern basis were established. Although the Polish nobility envisaged a centralised and unified state, a common legal code for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (drawn up by the Constitution of 3 May 1791), and institutions operating on an equal footing, the representatives from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania often secured separate laws (in the case of the delineation commission and the Lithuanian Tribunal), or at least supplementary laws (in the case of the landowners’ law court). For this reason, some differences remained in the organisation and operation of the courts of the two constituent states of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a result of the reforms, important changes took place in the organisation of land courts and the regulation of the activity of judges: the composition of the courts was changed, a new procedure for electing judges was introduced (the introduction of the general election of judges and their terms of office), and the competence of the courts and the regulation of the activities of the courts and their offices were defined in greater detail. On the other hand, the judiciary still remained estate-dependent; there was no separation between administrative and judicial functions, the issue of the professionalism of the judges was not raised, and the organisation and operating principles of the judiciary differed significantly, even within a single estate (judicial systems operating on a unified basis did not yet exist). The laws passed by the Four-Year Sejm sought to define in some detail the structure of the courts and the duties of the judges and other officials (in this respect, referring to the ideas of the Enlightenment to create the most comprehensive and clear law possible), but important organisational issues, such as the courts’ location, their maintenance, and judges’ salaries, were not fully resolved.