Psychological and Legal Determinants of the Professional Legal Identity of the Lawyer

Abstract

Radical changes in the domestic legal life have a large impact on the understanding of law, legality, nomocracy, law-making and law-enforcement activities, legal culture, human and civil rights and freedoms. That is why the most expedient is the study of professional legal consciousness, taking into account the essence of the phenomenon of “legal consciousness”, which is studied through the prism of the basic provisions of the psychological, sociological and communicative theory of law. Such an approach creates the preconditions for research and professional justice of the lawyer, the essence and features of which are specified in the content of legal psychology and legal ideology, in the system of legal knowledge, representations, values orientations inherent to lawyers. The professional legal consciousness of a lawyer determines the role of law-making and law-enforcement activity and acts as an important guarantee of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen, ensures the perfection of the form and content of sources of law. The system analysis of the professional activity of the lawyer proves that this activity is a multilevel hierarchical entity in which legal consciousness is a component of the higher, socio-psychological level of the organization of the behavior of the individual. In constant interaction with other levels of personality development as a holistic functional system, the expert’s legal consciousness acts as a psychological mechanism of motivation and selfregulation of professional activity. The analysis of objective factors of lawyer’s development allows the lawyer to identify the main determinants of this process as a system of social phenomena such as the socio-economic structure of society, the level and categorical structure of social justice, norms of morality and law, the system of general and vocational education. The most important subjective-psychological factors of the development of professional justice of a lawyer is a system of assimilated legal concepts-categories and principles on which the psychological structure of his professional law-enforcement activity is based. The leading role in the state of the legal profession of lawyers has a scientific, theoretical, professional legal knowledge, including knowledge of domestic and European jurisprudence