“Every Scientifically Educated Lawyer Should be a Cultural Fighter for the Ideals of Law in Life!“ — Nikolay I. Palienko’s Legal and Political Views

Abstract

. The paper analyzes the legal views of Nikolay I. Palienko, a prominent philosopher of law and a state historian of the beginning of the last century. The authors pay significant attention to the integrative concept of legal understanding that is followed by Prof. Nikolay Palienko. They also substantiate originality and significance of the concept in the light of modernization of the political and legal order in late imperial Russia. It seems that under certain conditions it could serve as a bridge between positivist jurisprudence and the doctrine of “reborn natural law” developed in pre-revolutionary Russia. It was intended to smooth out the contradictions in both doctrines and contribute to the development of a new methodology for law understanding in the context of transformation of the Russian legal system towards establishing institutions of constitutional order.On the basis of published sources, the authors show the evolution of the scholar’s views from the positivist theory of law to idealism that is not properly estimated in the legal literature and is quite typical for the legal scholars of the interrevolutionary period.The authors conclude that Prof. Nikolay I. Palienko scholarship and knowledge allowed him to substantiate his own concept of legal understanding that can be considered integrative on the basis of achievements of the positivist theory of law, philosophy of natural law, psychological and sociological concepts of legal understanding. Prof. Palienko proclaimed the normative nature of law and at the same time expressed ideas of the supremacy of law over the state and the coherence of the state provided by law. An essential element of his legal concept was the legal consciousness of the society, acknowledgement of its role in the course of law education, as well as its establishment as a source of law. Palienko’s idea of legal coherence of the state represents a synthesis of positivism with idealism and leads to a new stage of development of legal methodology and ideology, namely: integrative jurisprudence. Scholar’s political and legal ideas contributed to the development of ideas about the rule of law, which were very popular in Russia during the period of development of representative institutions and constitutionalism.