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The subject of this paper are those factual states that occurred on the basis of the agrarian reform decree and concerned the unlawful seizure by the State of palace-park complexes. It was only after the collapse of real socialism in 1989 that the owners or their legal successors obtained an annulment of the decision to seize the property. However, this was, and is, only the beginning of the struggle, as the State Treasury or its legal successors are claiming before the common courts the acquisitive prescription of the property being the subject to the recovery claim. The divergence of at least 20 years in jurisprudence as to the date of commencement of the period required for acquisitive prescription (1980–1991) is an undesirable phenomenon, requiring the adoption of a coherent approach of the courts. Consequently, the authors of this text represent the view that the period of validity of both the Agrarian Reform Decree and the subsequent legal acts, with particular emphasis on the period of validity of the Decree of 1945 (Journal of Laws no. 28, item 321) and then Article 9 (16) of the Act of 1958 excluded the course of the acquisitive prescription in favour of the State Treasury of the agricultural and forestry properties unlawfully seized by the State. This period lasted until 31 December 1991, i.e. until the final date when Article 9 (16) was in force.

The article presents the difficulties with introducing a new system of civil registrar offices in Poland after World War II. In 1945 the decree on birth, marriage and death registers was passed. It had big importance for the success of the process of the unification of civil law, which took place then. The prevailing part of the Polish society knew nothing about the lay system of registrar’s office and they followed Catholic Church regulations in this matter. The result was that in 1946 less than half of births, marriages and deaths were registered in the civil offices. The article describes the measures which were undertaken to force the society to register. The new communist government had a dilemma whether it would be better to use arguments of the utilitarian character or rather to force people by using sanctions. The first method turned out to be more important.

POLISH 1950 FAMILY CODE – A TURNING-POINT? Summary Shortly after World War II new Communist authorities unified civil law in Poland. It was based on drafts prepared before the war by the Codification Committee, so it was a good example of law based on European legal tradition. In 1948 political situation has changed and new civil law was declared as a “bourgeois” and it had to be changed to become “socialist”. Family law was replaced as the first one, and it was separated from civil code, like in the USSR. The draft was prepared together with Czechoslovakia. Among many changes, the most important were: new construction of matrimonial property relations (joint ownership of husband and wife), new regulation of divorce, equal position of children coming out of wedlock, new legal shape of adoption. Only joint property of husband and wife can be regarded as a turning-point, the other changes were not as important. In fact, real turning-point in Polish family law took place in 1945, when civil marriages and divorces were introduced.