Нарративный подход в правовых исследованиях: назначение и методология

Abstract

A study of practice shows that law enforcers in Russia do not always follow the so-called “spirit of the law”, often giving priority just to its formal interpretations. In order to understand why this happens, it is necessary to examine the narrative stories behind such enforcement practices. Narratives can not only explain the existing law enforcement, but also create a new law enforcement practice and legal reasoning. Thus, narrative research is a useful tool for studying both lawmaking process and law enforcement practices. The aim of the study is to assess the impact of narratives on lawmaking process and law enforcement practices, as well as the development of the basics of the methodology for using narratives in legal research. The study used hermeneutic methods, as well as analysis of the results of empirical studies of law enforcement practices, comparative legal research, which together made it possible to propose goals, objectives, sources for obtaining narrative stories and data processing methods for conducting law enforcement research carried out using a narrative approach and narrative methods. The study resulted in the following. (1) Two functions of narrative methods and approaches in legal research have been identified: (i) cognitive (heuristic), which can be used to identify narratives that determine law enforcement, to explore them in order to understand how they are formed and how they can influence the legal reality, law enforcement practices, legal reasoning and lawmaking; (ii) prognostic-and-transformative, which makes it possible to identify the necessity for reforming legal regulations and to offer structural, organizational, legal means designed to eliminate the identified problems of law enforcement. (2) A classification of narratives has been invented. It includes four groups of narratives depending on the coverage: personal, professional, regional, national, international. (3) The possibility of using the following linguistic and special-legal methods has been proved: (a) a structural and linguistic study of narrative stories. The study of plot repetitions, of the word’s usage, etc.; (b) a study of words (and their omissions) in official documents; (c) a focused research of narrative stories in regions where practices that are not in accordance with the law are repeated; (d) identification of the relationship between the collected number of narrative stories and the results of statistical processing of the studied empirical materials; (e) analysis of the correlation of narrative stories and legislation, data on the organization of judicial activities.