The Cossack law of the Hetmanate as a political and legal pheno menon

Abstract

Cossack law, as a legal system, is researched by the authors, as a civilizational phenomenon of Ukrainian history, as well as anentirely Ukrainian national-political and legal phenomenon, inseparable from the Cossack state, which had been the apogee of evolutionof which belongs to the times of the Hetmanate. It is emphasized that the origins of the process of origination of Ukrainian law itself,that is, the time when its original difference from the laws of neighboring states – Poland, Moscow, Ottoman Empire, etc., and belongsto the period of the Hetmanate (in particular, its initial stage of the Khmelnytskiy region). The thesis, which is argued by the authors ofthe article is that the decisive influence on the formation of the Ukrainian legal system at that time was, in fact, the civilizational choiceof the representatives of all social strata of the land population under the Hetman’s jurisdiction in favor of consolidating the basic principlesof Cossack philosophy reflecting a peculiar system of values in the arrangement of the society, including freedom, equity, equa -lity and public interest. Arguments of the authors are presented indicating the beginning of a new quality of Ukrainian Cossack law –in contrast to the former corporate one; it is becoming a sign of Ukrainian national law owing to the change in social nature. And thisquality, in general, could not be undermined by the changes of the dominant in the application of the homegrown and externallyimposed rights that fell to the decline of the Cossack-Hetman state, the last quarter of the 17the century and, in fact, throughout thewhole 18th century as well. It is concluded, that one of the consequences of the Cossack influence on the societal legal relations wasthe fact that the population of the Hetman region actually outstripped its historical time of pre-bourgeois societal relations.