Polish Administrative Court’s Dissenting Opinions in Excise Duty Cases

Abstract

This article presents the results of the examination dissenting opinions submitted by judges of administrative courts in excise duty cases in the years 2004–2018. The analysis covers the judgments of all sixteen administrative courts in Poland issued in the abovementioned period. These criteria led to the selection of research material covering a votum separatum from 78 judgments issued by administrative courts on excise duty and 60 judgements issued by the Supreme Administrative Court as a result of filing a cassation appeal against administrative court judgments. By using quantitative analysis in the performed case studies, it has been determined that, for example, administrative court judges extremely rarely submit in cases of excise duty votum separatum – about five times per year. Between 2004 and 2018 out of 19,172 judgments issued only to 78 of them issued a dissenting opinion, which is more or less 0.5% of the total. In the course of case studies using qualitative analysis it has been observed, for example, that in the constituent part of the justification - the legal basis of the decision and its explanation – the SAC referred to the arguments expressed in a separate opinion in 41% of judgments.