Kahan, I., Lipkin, I., A Collection of Exercises in Criminal Law. Part I [1928]

Title: A Collection of Exercises in Criminal Law. Part I.

Author: I. Kahan, attorney-at-law trainee; Dr. I. Lipkin [Warsaw lawyers—an attorney-at-law trainee and a doctor of law from the University of Warsaw, author of a study on fraud in criminal law].

Publisher: Warsaw, main distribution center at F. Hoesick’s Bookstore.

Year of publication: 1928.

Format: 19 cm.

Number of pages: 48.

Binding: Half-cloth binding.

This collection was published at a pivotal moment in the unification of Polish law. The reborn state had to consolidate the criminal laws inherited from the three partitions. In the territories of the former Russian partition, the Criminal Code of 1903 was in force; in Galicia, the Austrian Criminal Code of 1852; and in Greater Poland and Pomerania, the German Criminal Code of 1871. In 1928, the President of the Republic of Poland issued the “Law on the Organization of the Ordinary Courts” (February 6) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (March 19). This code entered into force on July 1, 1929. A unified Criminal Code, based on a draft by Juliusz Makarewicz, was not introduced until 1932. During this transitional period, teaching aids were developed to instruct students and legal trainees in solving legal case studies. The presented Part I is of a practical nature and documents the method of teaching criminal law in the late 1920s. The collection was noted in the current review of legal literature from 1928–1929. The main distribution was handled by F. Hoesick’s bookstore in Warsaw. Following in the footsteps of his father, Ferdynand Wilhelm (1835–1900), the bookstore was managed by Ferdynand Hoesick (1867–1941), a writer, literary historian, and biographer of Chopin.

I. Kahan signed the title page as a law clerk. His co-author, Dr. I. Lipkin, had published his doctoral dissertation two years earlier, titled “Fraud in Light of Current Criminal Codes and Legislative Proposals. A Historical and Dogmatic Study” (1926). The dissertation was accepted by the Faculty of Law Council at the University of Warsaw. It was published by the university’s Criminal Law Seminar, with a foreword by Prof. Wacław Makowski.

Provenance: on the title page, a stamp that is illegible due to attempts to erase it; on the front endpaper, notes regarding duplicate copies, indicating library cataloging and the subsequent removal of the piece from the collection. Traces of metal staples are also visible, remnants of the original, functional binding of the booklet. The name of the institution remains unidentified.

This is an educational aid from the period of the unification of Polish criminal law. A valuable resource for researchers of the history of criminal law in the Second Polish Republic, historians of the legal profession and legal training, and collectors of early legal prints.

The text block is compact, the paper is clean, and the text is complete and intact. The half-cloth binding is in very good condition and effectively protects the small stack of pages—brochures of this type rarely survive in such good condition and rarely appear on the antiquarian market.

Catalog ID: 14270-19-A-X