Approaches to Understanding the Social Effect of Legal Institutions

Abstract

The aim of the study is to assess the social effect in the conditions of the formation and operation of legal institutions: legal mentality, legal mindset, legal consciousness, legal culture in lawmaking and law enforcement practice. The theoretical and legal approach made it possible to reveal the legal nature of the category "legal mentality — legal mindset — legal consciousness — legal culture" in the interconnection expressed by dialectics and logic of manifestation, where the main criterion is the continuity and consistency of legal institutions. The paper establishes the dependence of the social effect on the effectiveness of legal institutions as a result of the civic consciousness of society and the state, and identifies the factors of the onset of legal implementation and/or legal expansion. The historical and legal approach reveals the variables of the continuity of legal institutions through the prism of the relationship between legal determinism and voluntarism, leading to legal implementation or legal expansion. Based on a comparative analogy of the features of harmonization ("consistency") and unification of norms ("universality") in the field of administrative legal relations, their direct relationship is established between organizational and legal activities. The analysis of historical and legal preconditions allows us to establish such legal risks as formalism, falsification, latency inherent in the transitional periods of the legal system, as well as the lack of historical and legal continuity and incompleteness of the formation of legal institutions. Therefore, the elimination of the risks of social effect provides for strengthening the imperative of the formation of legal institutions using educational, cultural and educational technologies as a tool for preserving the historical and legal continuity of legal consciousness and legal culture in achieving the social effect of civil society.