Rzecz o tym, jak ustawodawca powiedział to, czego powiedzieć nie zamierzał – uwagi na temat art. 158 § 1 Kodeksu karnego

The article concerns two legal and linguistic opinions which are a legal analysis of the article 158 item 1 of the Criminal Code. The authors claim that this regulation (its wording) has been a considerable divergence ever since the Criminal Code entered into force in 1997. Legally, it means the divergence between what the legislator said and what he possibly intended to say. According to the authors, the legislator’s communicative intention was not implemented in this case. The reason for this was the fact that the analized fragment (the article 158 item 1) of the legal text (the current Criminal Code in Poland), which is an important tool for social impact, does not meet the demands made for legal texts: clarity, comprehension, and explicitness. The divergence shown in the article is associated with the legislator’s use of the pronoun “which/who” and the phrase “the man is exposed to occurrence”. Morover, the analysis of the article 158 item 1 of the Criminal Code conducted by the authors contains clues. They allow this regulation to be drafted in such a way as to reflect the intentions of the legislator.