ABSTRACT
The constitutional framework for the new Polish state remained a matter of continuing political controversy from the time of the Round Table negotiations of early 1989 up to and beyond the successful referendum on the new Constitution on 25 May 1997. The long genesis of a new Constitution meant a degree of legal confusion over the political institutions and their relationships, which were governed after 1989 by a series of further ad hoc amendments to the already unrecognizable 1952 ‘Stalin’ Constitution and from December 1992 the new so-called Little Constitution. This eight-year period of ‘piecemeal legal engineering’1 in the absence of a constitutional anchor was significant in a number of ways.
