Vasily Ivanovich Leshkov and His Theory of the “Social Law” as an Attempted Alternative to the “Police Law”

Abstract

University of Moscow Professor Vasily Leshkov constructed a theory of “social law” in the 1850s to provide an alternative theory to “police law”. He intended to go beyond the opposition between private and public law. Following German legal scholars, (most notably, The German Historical School of Law, he introduced a triadic distinction of civil, social, and state laws. This distinction enabled him to break the identification of public with political (polis). He described the sphere of “social law” as a “foundation for self-governance”. At the same time, Leshkov distinguished between political and non-political publicity, and thus showed the compatibility of self-governance with autocracy. His numerous publications in influential Russian magazines (“Russkiy Vestnik”, “Russkaya Beseda”, “Den’” etc.) indicate the increasing popularity of his views at the end of the 1850-60s. Within the academic system of that time, his ideas belonged to the vague discipline of “police law”. This belonging rapidly changed from the early 1870s when the discipline underwent doctrinal and institutional framing. “Police law” became a part of a conceptual model elaborated by Ivan Andreevskiy, whose debates with Leshkov are analyzed in my paper in order to describe their general views. While Andreevskiy’s model gained prominence, Leshkov’s views gradually became marginalized by the 1890-1910's. The paper describes this process through the analysis of the appropriate teaching materials.