What is the Methodology of Criminal Law

Abstract

The article raises the question of a modern role of methodology in criminal law and criminal law studies. The author reveals the essence of methodology in criminal law and its significance, approaches to methodology definitions and its current state. The author pays special attention to materialist dialectics and a formal-dogmatic method of cognition, their specificity and manifestations in criminal law. Pluralism in the methodology of criminal law does not contribute to its development. The current situation within the framework of criminal law methodology reveals a contradiction between new actual data with regard to law enforcement practice concerning the issues of criminal law application and the older ways of their explanations. These contradictions can lead to a diversion of a legal abstraction existing in criminal law from particular legal reality, as well as to accumulation of only a certain amount of knowledge concerning a particular criminal phenomenon at the empirical level. It is noted that criminal law methodology should be defined as a system of principles and ways to organize, form, and implement cognitive-theoretical legal experience in the field of research on crime and punishment. Criminal law methodology should not be equated with a formal-dogmatic method of cognition and take it as a basis for scientific research. The core of criminal law methodology is a unity of transmutation of dialectics, gnosiology and legal dogmatics. Methodology of the modern science of criminal law is a complex and multi-faceted institution that covers: problems of a structure of scientific knowledge in criminal law and scientific theories (constructions); laws of appearance, functioning and changes of scientific legal theories and doctrines in criminal law; a conceptual frame of criminal law; the structure and operative system of research methods applied in the criminal law; analysis of a criminal law language. In the future, methodological foundations of criminal law should be associated with an ability and cognitive perspective to combine methodological approaches and the knowledge of crime and punishment or their elements.