The Code civil in the Jurisprudence of the Free City of Kraków (1815-1846) : between the French and Austrian legal cultures.

Selected examples from the jurisprudence of the courts of the Free City of Krakow prove that the application of the Code civil was often based on an interpretation of regulations which did not meet the intention and content of the French codification. On the one hand, the courts, through an original interpretation of legal norms, aimed to deliber-ately circumvent French law in order to weaken its rigor in relation to the rights of women or illegitimate children. On the other hand, the erroneous interpretation of the law showed that the courts were not always able to abandon the way of legal thinking which corresponded to the assumptions of Austrian legislation, but differed from the systemic regula-tions of the Code civil. An important role in the control of courts over the application of French law was played by the Faculty of Law of the Jagiellonian University. At the request of the parties to court proceedings it checked the compli-ance with substantive and formal law of two rulings of different court instances on the same content. In the opinions issued, the Law Faculty instructed the courts in such fundamental matters as e.g. the form of legal action for eviden-tiary purposes (ad probationem).