Although the Provisional People’s Government of the Polish Republic was formed by political colleagues of Józef Piłsudski, it did not win his support because of its party-character. Ignacy Daszyński therefore submitted his resignation to Józef Piłsudski on November 12, the day after Piłsudski had returned to Poland from Magdeburg.

Rulings of courts of the first instance did not necessarily end the proceedings. When the defendant made use of appeal procedures, the case went before the second instance court: the rally court (which ceased to function in the fifteenth century) and the royal court. However, since the king was the final appellate instance, in a state as vast as Rzeczpospolita, it was impossible to conclude all cases. Despite this, discussions regarding the reform of the justice system continued for almost 40 years. On the one hand, king Sigismund Augustus defended his appellate prerogative over all his subjects, and on the other, noblemen were afraid of strengthening the role of the Senate, as those were the times of the executionist movement, which fought with determination to increase the importance of the nobility masses to detriment of the magnates, of whom the Senate was composed.

Finally, king Stephen Báthory was persuaded into a compromise. In 1578, the Polish law judiciary was separated from the monarch and the General Crown Tribunal was established. Similar institutions were established for Lithuania (1581), Prussia (1585) and Ukraine (1589-1590). The Tribunal consisted of judges, called deputies [‘deputat’], who were elected once a year, in the number of twenty-seven, at deputies’ assemblies. There were no considerable changes in the election of judges until the Constitution of 1764, which required from candidates to have legal expertise, to own land property for more than one year, not to be involved in proceedings and to have a clean criminal record.

The dispute took on a new dimension with the advent of the Reformation. At first, Polish noblemen became very close to Calvinism, whose vision of community seemed more attractive than that of Lutheranism. Paradoxically, however, this turn was marked by theological conservatism and a sincere desire to reform the Church. One of the close associates of the Papal Nuncio in the Rzeczpospolita noted in 1565 that, as regards dogmatic matters, knights were Catholic. But when the idea of defending the privileges of the clerical state was mentioned, nobody declared themselves Catholic. Similarly, changing the religion was the best way to escape from the jurisdiction of an ecclesiastical court.

Reformation in Rzeczpospolita proceeded relatively calmly: there was no burning at the stake or, as in France, civil war. However, this does not mean that there were no excesses. The Catholic argumentation relied on the instances of profanation of paintings, Eucharistic figures and taking over temples. Punishment was expected for perpetrators but only the bishop’s court, whose jurisdiction was not welcomed, could pass a sentence in such cases. That tangle of conflicting powers and religious ambitions needed to be cut somewhere. It finally happened after long discussions at the Piotrków Sejm of 1562-1563. By prohibiting starosts from executing judgements of ecclesiastical courts, the resolution of 1563 de facto abolished ecclesiastical jurisdiction, not only in matters of faith, but also in property disputes.

At the same time, however, a considerable change occurred within the nobility itself. It found itself under the influence of three important factors: parliamentarianism guaranteed with the Nihil Novi constitution (1505), increased influence of works by Aristotle and Cicero and the actual needs of the state. This gave birth to the so-called Executionist movement, with many outstanding thinkers and statesmen among its supporters. Stanisław Orzechowski (1513–1566), a clergyman and historian, was one of them. He was highly educated, and his rhetoric skills were exceptional, which gave him the nickname of the ideologist of the Nobles’ Golden Liberty.

Orzechowski enumerated the principles of the republican politics in his Appeal to the Polish noblemen, focusing on the law and its meaning for the functioning of the State. Owing to this law, Poland enjoyed such an attractive way of living that even its neighbouring states, such as Ruthenia, wanted to join the Kingdom as a province. It also protected freedom, which was less and less common in other European countries dominated by monarchs’ absolutism. Finally, the Kingdom of Poland, whose political system drew from the ancient mixed governments, enjoyed stability so that the king, the senate or the nobility did not threaten the interests of the whole state.

Orzechowski stated that all of those rights that served Poland so well were gathered and codified by Jakub Przyłuski. Orzechowski’s work was just an introduction to the collection. We could say that if Przyłuski’s Statutes were a legal textbook, Orzechowski’s Appeal was a practical commentary. Thanks to the latter, noblemen could learn that they were not just subjects to the king but also citizens of a free country.

In this context Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski was a unique figure. He not only remained an advocate of equality and a keen fighter for the reform of the penal code as far as punishment for homicide was concerned, but also his horizons were much broader. Written in impeccable Latin, his O poprawie Rzeczypospolitej [on the betterment of the Commonwealth] was a work which undertook to present the state affairs in a comprehensive manner. Its beginning was based on Aristotle’s authority, but the shift in thinking was manifested in the details. Frycz modified Stagirite’s definition and stressed that “all inhabitants of the Commonwealth are obliged to direct all their work, intentions, effort, diligence, and providence towards the benefit of all citizens’ well-being, so that everybody can live a happy life.” This thought then set the direction of the reasoning presented throughout it. The Commonwealth exists because it is bound by law and as the same laws are to govern the state, then criminals should be subject to equal punishment. Thus equality before the law is a consequence of the initial assumption that the Commonwealth exists for the happiness of all its citizens. And the law, which is to serve the state, can vary punishments, but only to the top dignitaries’ detriment because their crimes do more harm to the state than the crimes committed by plebeians.

On the one hand, Frycz’s thought was characterized by great radicalism of opinions and it was difficult to expect that the 16th-century society would accept it. On the other hand, O poprawie Rzeczpospolitej is a pearl of the Old Polish political thought, which in its masterpiece did not forget to plead the lowest class’ cause.

At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, the monetary system descended into chaos that was caused by the dynamic process of the debasement of coinage related to, for example, the lack of precious metal in Europe. In his Writings about Money (1526) which were dedicated to the causes of the deterioration of money, the decrease of its purchasing power and social and political consequences of this process, Nicolaus Copernicus made a distinction between the face and intrinsic value of a coin.

Moreover, he stated that if there were two coins with a similar face value in circulation, the coin that had the highest quantity of the precious metal would be supplanted and accumulated. As a result, only the worse coin would remain on the market. Hence, the principle that explains this process, “bad money drives out good”, which, in the economy, is called the Gresham–Copernicus law. Copernicus also noted that “bad money” could have a negative influence on the economy of the whole country and even lead to its fall.