The author worked for 43 years as a research and teaching employee of the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Silesia in Katowice, the head of the Department of the History of Law; for 15 years he also worked at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bialystok; for 11 years he has been a professor at the Humanitas University in Sosnowiec; in communist times he specialized in the history of Polish parliamentarism and Polish criminal law up to 1795; after 1990 he has specialized in the history of law of the Polish People’s Republic in 1944–1989 and in the law of Russia and the USSR in 1917–1991.