About me

 I was awarded PhD by the Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law and Administration based on my thesis Truth and Truth-Makers in Legal Discourse: Law as an Institutional Kind. I work currently at the University of Warsaw, Law and Administration Faculty as an assistant professor (adiunkt). My current focus is on the project no 2020/36/C/HS5/00600 funded by the National Science Center of Poland (Analysis of the concept of a legal person from an ontological and linguistic perspective). I am also a researcher in another OPUS project (no 2022/45/B/HS5/04133): Conceptual change or conceptual manipulation? How to tell apart a natural evolution of legal concepts from their abuse. In 2026 I will start my new OPUS project on identity of legal institutions (no 2025/57/B/HS5/05044).

I am an editor of Studia Iuridica and the director of German Law School at the University of Warsaw.

I am a member of: (a) the Jagiellonian Center for Law, Laguage and Philosophy, co-founded as a result of the Law-Language-Philosophy Research Network project (funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange) that I used to coordinate; (b) Lisbon Legal Theory Group ; (c) Polish Research Centre for Law and Economy of China

I also teach regularly at the Department of Philosophy and Bioethics (Jagiellonian University Medical College). From time to time I also teach at the Institute of Philosophy and Institute of Psychology (Jagiellonian University).

I used to work at the Jagiellonian University, both Faculty of Law and Administration as well as Faculty of Philosophy. I was awarded a START Scholarship by the Foundation for Polish Science. I was a visiting scholar at the Loránd Eötvös University (awarded by the Visegrad Fund), University at Buffalo (SUNY),  Australian National University (ANU), University of New South Wales (UNSW), Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Freiburg i.B., University of Adelaide and University of Auckland. In 2024 I was awarded Fulbright Senior Award to spend few months as a visiting scholar at UCLA. 

I graduated with master degrees in law, philosophy and psychology. I also studied general linguistics. My main research interests include philosophy of law, philosophy of language, social ontology as well as law&psychology. If I were to pick one and only topic that best describes my interests, I'd probably choose: methodology of humanities and social science. 

My professional interests include family law and entertainment law (I used to be a media producer during my short break from academia). Nowadays, outside academia, I offer legal counsel to an adoption center and manage a tennis school. I sometimes also offer my counsel in the area of law and psychology. In my free time I either enjoy my family life or learn languages (never had any talent whatsoever but managed to acquire some basic understanding of Polish, English, German, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Danish and Lithuanian).

My current research themes:

• ontological status of legal entities, esp. environmental personhood

• semantics of institutional names

• feigning PTSD

• cognitive functioning of psychopaths

• scientific status of diachronic linguistics

• methodology of jurisprudence, esp. methodology of comparative jurisprudence

Best way to get in touch with me is via e-mail: either p.banas [.at.] uw.edu.pl OR pawel.banas [.at.] uj.edu.pl