Дихотомия частное – публичное право: сравнительный анализ идеи

Abstract

The Soviet legal system did not assume any division of law into private and public constituents since communist ideology did not recognise anything private as such. The end of the communist experiment and Russia’s transition to democracy, a state governed by the rule of law, a social market economy and respect for human rights logically led to the need to revive private law and its further development, and therefore the idea of dividing law into private law and public law became relevant in legal doctrine. The article contains a brief comparative analysis of Russian and French legal theories in terms of the concerned problem. The methods used are comparative law, legal hermeneutics, the formal legal method and certain elements of cultural and historical analysis. Despite the conventionality of the public-private law dichotomy, its theory is based upon the actual legal reality of the Romano-German family of legal systems; this theory is not just an abstract theorisation, but is feasible. Unlike the French theory, Russian jurisprudence applies an approach suggested by S.S. Alexeev, who points to the conceptual rather than classification-based nature of the dichotomy in the first place, stressing that private law expresses the most important essence of law as a whole and the new trend in its develop ment is to include human rights. Based on this analysis, it is concluded that human rights are the common part that unites public and private law, and therefore their unity is inseparable: prejudice to human rights, as the experience of building communism in Russia (and in other communist countries) showed, inevitably leads first to the destruction of private law, and then to the transformation of public law into a pseudo-legal system.