This article attempts to interpret and analyze the applica­tion of Article 39 of the Labor Code in the context of the prohibition on terminating a fixed-term employment con­tract that expires before the employee reaches retirement age. The doubts that prompted the authors to analyze this issue stem from discrepancies in the Supreme Court’s case law and a tendency to limit the protection afforded by Article 39 of the Labor Code exclusively to employees of pre-retirement age employed under open-ended con­tracts. The question of the legitimacy of maintaining this restrictive interpretation formed the basis for a multifac­eted examination of this issue. Based on their analysis, the authors concluded that the function of Article 39 of the Labor Code—regardless of the length of the employee’s insurance record—is to protect the employee’s terms of employment, which begins upon reaching pre-retirement age and lasts for four years, regardless of the type of em­ployment contract.

The jurisprudence and doctrine have adopted the view that one of the prerequisites for acquiring the right to rehabilitation benefit is the requirement of the existence of uninterrupted (continued) inability to work. The authors try to present arguments that should lead to a departure from the previous interpretation in favor of the statement that an interruption in inability to work, occurring after the exhaustion of sickness benefits, does not constitute an obstacle to the granting of rehabilitation benefit. To this end, they conduct a consideration of the content of the risk protected by this benefit, as well as the linguistic and logical and purposeful interpretation of Article 18(1) of the Benefit Law, to encourage both practitioners (judges and attorneys) and representatives of science to reconsider the essence of the rehabilitation benefit.

Under current regulations, the period of the four-year assessorship cannot be extended or suspended. The assessor during this period should remain in full health, in constant working capacity and has no space to fulfill parental duties. If, in fact, longer periods of excused absence from work happened during the assessorship, then, of course, from the perspective of labor law, the assessor remains protected, but his work is still subjected to the process of appropriate evaluation, which directly translates into professional promotion. Then this shorter (due to, for example, parental leave) time to fulfill the duties of a judge may prove insufficient to make an objective assessment of the candidate's qualifications, as well as insufficient to gain adequate professional practice. This, in turn, can lead to very conscious decisions by the assessor (especially made by women) not to start a family during the assessorship and to postpone these plans. It seems that a correct pro-family policy of the state should adopt such legislative solutions that will encourage citizens to start a family and have children at the age that, for biological reasons, is most suitable for this. De lege lata, the existing legal loophole leads to a situation in which, with respect to assessors of parents, the constitutional principle of equal access to positions in the public service and the principle of equal treatment and non-discrimination is violated. In our legal order, there are already such solutions that make it possible to combine professional (university teachers) or training (doctoral students) duties with the role of a parent without harming either role. The legislator should also apply these solutions to court assessors, who belong to a young professional group of employees subject to both the training process and the evaluation system. De lege ferenda, the introduction into the Polish legal order of regulations that will allow an assessor to apply for an extension of the duration of the assessorship and its temporary suspension proportionally by the time of fulfilling parental duties, or by the time of other excused absence, remains necessary and fully justified.

The way of performing work by an academic teacher due to the COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot, and in the future these changes (especially in the field of didactics) may already be permanently inscribed in its standards. The need to perform work (teaching, research and organization) remotely, often in a home environment, has highlighted a number of problems. Undoubtedly, it was (and still remains) a challenge for an academic teacher to find their way in the realities of remote working. For the academic teacher who is a parent (caregiver), it remains a challenge to find the right rhythm between the professional and private spheres. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed not only long-standing problems related to the phenomenon of invisible (unpaid) work, or gender inequality in employment, but has also created completely new ones related to the expectations of constant readiness and availability of the employee to work or the imposition of additional obligations, which the employer has burdened teaching staff in particular. The existing doubts related to the evaluation of scientific work have also gained in strength. The lack of legal solutions regulating the issue of the impact of an employee's excused absence from work due to parental leave (and in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, absence due to the need toprovide care) on the evaluation of the quality of scientific activity is a significant burden for University employees. The sociological research cited in the article reveals that the burden of caregiving and performing additional duties rested primarily on the shoulders of women. In many cases, this has translated directly into the number of articles written, research conducted, or grant proposals submitted. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only forced some changes in the current organization of the professional work of academic teachers, but above all has revealed problems whose scope is no longer only individual, but primarily social. The aim of the article is to trace selected challenges faced today by women and men employed in higher education and to analyze the legal solutions in force as well as to identify gaps in the law that make it difficult to mitigate them. An interdisciplinary examination of the presented issues will enable us to search for legal and non-legal solutions, which will contribute to the removal of barriers in the academic work environment, in which many stereotypes still prevail.