What Motivates People to Comply With the Law and Regard It as Legitimate in the Polish System of Justice? The Identification and Analysis of the Construct of Procedural Justice

People appear in the courtroom when they engage in various disputes with others and have diverse problems of their own. The courts are supposed to provide them with a space where they can obtain justice, in accordance with the law. It is no less important, however, that while pursuing this goal the courts should deal with people’s problems in a way that makes the people willing to accept and comply with their decisions. The central issue defining the scope of this empirical study was the question of what element of the construct of procedural justice promotes behaviors associated with legitimacy and compliance with the law in the Polish judicial system. The author set out to investigate what identified procedural justice in Polish legal culture and what variables pertaining to the context of legal proceedings it was related to. The sample consisted of 115 individuals taking part in civil court proceedings conducted in civil divisions of district courts. Based on analyses performed on research results it can be concluded that behaviors associated with legitimacy and compliance with the law in the Polish judicial system is determined by the sense of fairness experienced in the courtroom, whose structure is built by experiences such as being given the opportunity to speak, being treated with respect, the judge’s impartiality, the comprehensibility of the language used and procedures applied in the courtroom, and the sense of influence on the final outcome of the proceedings