Archaizmy języka prawniczego

The article concerns the Polish legal language. The author presents several expressions that are both professionalisms (i.e. are used only by lawyers and have survived only in legal language) and archaisms (i.e. come from distant ages and are no longer used in everyday language), explains their origin and provides information concerning the frequency of their occurrence in judicial decisions over the last 100 years. The research results indicate that there are archaisms-professionalisms in the legal language, dating back to the Middle Ages and the times of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the Polish legal system they are scarce remnants of these periods. There are also many archaisms of Germanic origin, which infiltrated the Polish judicial language during the partitions and in some regions of Poland are more popular than other expressions.