Studia Administracyjne

The protection of the banking sector is one of the most difficult challenges faced by modern legislators. Finding a balance between protecting its safety and maintaining its profitability and competitiveness requires almost permanent adjustments to the current legal status. The difficulty of this task is often intensified by the need to protect other values of the legal system, especially constitutional values such as consumer protection. Therefore, recognizing the importance of the above issues, this paper aims to attempt to answer the question about the status of protection of the banking sector's stability in light of constitutional norms. Searching for an answer to such a question, the author based his considerations on the dogmatic legal method, which includes a detailed analysis of the views of the doctrine, binding constitutional solutions, and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Tribunal. An important supplement and development of the conducted considerations was the reflection on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union, which - at least several times - also referred to the problem of perceiving the stability of the banking system as a value of the legal system. The conducted considerations ultimately led the author to the conclusion that, although the protection of the stability of the banking sector is not a task directly expressed in the Constitution, it is a kind of instrumental value, the safety of which is in fact a kind of care over other constitutional values. Therefore, for the sake of its protection, it may serve as a kind of interpretative model, which may sometimes justify a departure from the – even relatively unambiguous – linguistic interpretation of specific provisions in the field of – broadly understood – banking law.