Commemorative lawmaking: Memory frames of the democratic backsliding in Poland after 2015

The article discusses the part played by collective memory in the current threat to the rule of law in Poland. The starting point is the concept of commemorative lawmaking and a critical discussion of the use of the concept of memory laws in recent scholarship. An analysis of framing operations performed by PiS memory politics offers examples of how the notion of commemorative lawmaking can be deployed in order to explore techniques of legal governance of memory, including bricolage (illustrated by the case of Polish Constitution of 1997), retouch (exemplified by recent reform of Polish judiciary) and re-stylization (analysis based on the Act on National Institute of Remembrance of 2018). The article concludes with an exploration of the intrinsic connection between the threat to the rule of law in Poland and memory politics of the current Polish government, accompanied by a discussion of possible further developments in the field of law and memory studies.