Autonomous Processual Model of Law

Abstract

The jurisprudence experiences profound transitions in Ukraine and worldwide. Legal systems are changing, influenced by economic, political, and social factors. There are conservative, revolutionary, and evolutionary trends arising in law practice and legal thought. The most promising tendency is evolutionary jurisprudence that keeps no illusions of eternal laws and momentarily made changes. In evolutionary jurisprudence, morality as the beliefs about the good and the evil, ethics as the philosophy of rules, and law as the science of fair judgments are considered to be three historical stages of the development of legal knowledge. The evolution of legal thinking leads to the development of an autonomous processual (pragmatic) model of law, along with known models of authoritative command, the social contract, and procedural justice. In the autonomous processual model, the rule of law and the reality are united: the law is inalienable from life. The law is essentially the rule that realizes itself: laws of nature are repeating by objects of experiments, human laws are performing by subjects of legal culture. Laws of nature should be recognized as legal norms with the further establishment of the rule of law in the sphere of science. Valid methods of legal processes research must take into account autonomy of these processes and autonomy of their elements, individual regularities of their existence, practical knowledge of the autonomy of matter and the autonomy of will, as well as dynamic nature of legal processes. Personal autonomy allows the human, organization, or artificial intelligence to change the status quo by reasonable judgments and actions based on the internal logic of the legal process, which links the actions with consequences. Legal progress in the autonomous processual model overcomes the static bias, the alienation of elements from the system and subsystemic erosion of justice. The law as a fair form of freedom allows each person to be an agent of the rule of law in own sphere of competence, saving law enforcement resources, refusing to absolutize coercion, invalidating obsolete and unrealistic norms. Evolutionary balancing of freedom and responsibility, of rights and duties, creates the legal environment, safe and favorable for the successful life and human development.