Law and legal system: to the problem of terminological accuracy (general theoretical and historical legal aspects)

Abstract

This scientific article, the monograph of A.V. Seregin “The Evolution of Old Slavic Law (Middle Ages: from communal-veche sources to serfdom)”, analyzes normative and sociological approaches to the concept of the legal system of society. It is emphasized that the regulatory approach developed during the Soviet period of development of domestic jurisprudence, supported by the author of the monograph, which identifies such concepts as legal system and legal system, is not able to characterize the phenomenon of the legal system, because national law , which largely determines its essence, is only one of the components of the latter, its normative basis. Using such an empirical method of knowledge of legal reality, as an interpretation, and believing that the sociological approach to understanding the legal system seems more justified, the diversity of views of scientists on this general theoretical problem is emphasized. This draws attention to the fact that the problem of its broad interpretation in domestic jurisprudence has not yet been fully resolved. It is stated that if the normative, functional and cultural-psychological (ideological, intellectual) aspects of understanding the legal system for the most part do not cause serious controversy in the legal literature, then axiological, on the contrary, becomes a topic for numerous discussions. In this case, I mean, first of all, the ongoing dispute between lawyers about the role and significance of negative legal phenomena (legal nihilism, law's gaps and its contradictions) in the construction of the legal system as such. The author argues that consideration of both positive and negative legal phenomena should be considered as the content of not the legal system, but the legal life in all its diversity. Various arguments of a general theoretical and historical-legal nature are given in substantiating the conclusion that the emergence of a general Russian legal system is conditioned only with the approval of the sovereignty of the Russian state.