Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the increasingly successful efforts of Polish mortgagors with housing loan contracts indexed to the Swiss franc to, through legal means that relies on decrypting legal and financial texts, contest their financialized debt and engage with a much-debated legal system.

Paper Abstract:

Polish financial institutions point to a specific group of debtors‘ increasingly successful individual litigation efforts as the biggest threat to economic stability (NBP 2022). Based on courtroom ethnographic research among litigating mortgagors known colloquially as frankowicze, this paper explores their debt contestation efforts with the aid of for-profit law firms and their legal claims of infringed European consumer protection rights codified in the legal system. A system fraught with political tensions such as “legal Polexit” and “old” and “new” judges. Due to the system and mistrust of public discourse saturated with lobby campaigns from the banking sector, debtors have to carefully track the changing line of jurisprudence over the last half decade consisting of more than 100,000 legal cases to gauge the legal and by extension financial risks of filing a lawsuit. To contest this creditor-debtor relation, they have to critically engage with the underlying written contractual obligations vis-a-vis the banking and civil laws and the court rulings from (supra)national courts with little legal literacy and push for a new legal understanding among judges, lawyers, and lay people. In the process, developing a new legal understanding of consumer protection among judges, lawyers, and mortgagors. This paper contributes to the literature on the intersections between finance and law (Pistor 2019; Riles 2011), the role that written material artifacts play in contemporary capitalism (Stein 2017), and housing contestation (Florea et al. 2022) by arguing for the need to consider legality as a tool to “unwrite” financial debt.