Gosudarstvo i pravo

The article examines the reasons for the negative perception of Russia’s image in Western and domestic historiography. It is noted that this trend arose from the moment when Russia revealed itself to the world as a powerful European state that was gaining strength and was laying claim to its own interests and political subjectivity. This fact caused serious concern among leading Western states. In fact, from the moment of its emergence on the historical field, Russia became the object of close attention from the point of view of its political, religious and cultural orientation. When it finally became clear that Russia would not be part of any project – cultural, military or religious, a tendency for a tendentious, negative image of our country was firmly established in Western historiography. The object of criticism, and most often fantasy and outright falsification, were precisely those rulers who strengthened Russian statehood the most. The beginning was laid by Western countries, but within Russian society itself and, most importantly, the cultural and administrative layer a peculiar political fashion was cultivated over a long historical period, the essence of which was to imitate the West, or even to openly submit to its interests. One of the reasons for this is that such educational and upbringing policies were carried out in Russian educational institutions that rather repelled future officials from serving the interests of the country. This trend continues to some extent to this day. In order to reverse this trend, it is necessary to conduct a significant reorientation of the educational and cultural policy of the modern Russian state. Only under this condition will the historiographic model of political and legal knowledge be effective against the distortion of the civilizational development of Russia. A small step in this direction would be the restoration of the history of political and legal doctrines in the system of legal education.

The most important element of the national mechanism of legal regulation are legal norms. This component is inherent in every legal system, but at the same time, it is evaluated differently based on established national traditions. It seems necessary to develop a unified transnational model of the doctrinal understanding of legal norms, regardless of the “family-wide” specifics of their understanding. The development of the doctrine of the integration perception of legal categories and concepts contributes to the qualitative normative convergence of legal systems, which will exclude mechanicalness in the legal borrowing of foreign norms of law and legal institutions, as well as contribute to the reception of legal norms that will not become socially indifferent to national legal systems.

The article examines the essence of judicial discretion in the context of its relationship with related legal concepts. The purpose of the study is to analyze the relationship between judicial discretion, judicial law-making, judicial interpretation contra legem, and law enforcement fictions to verify the possibility of establishing a “genus – type” relationship between them. It has been established that judicial law-making is one of the types of judicial discretion, and interpretation contra legem and law enforcement fictions are special cases of judicial law-making. Law enforcement fictions used in public law contradict the legislation and are a consequence of interpretation contra legem, while in private law they comply with the legislation and represent an independent method of judicial law-making.

The paper analyzes topical issues of the application of an interdisciplinary approach in the study of legal culture as a special case of its use in scientific knowledge in general. Approaches to understanding and the preferred order of application of an interdisciplinary approach in the study of legal culture are developed, the stages of determining the methodology of scientific research of legal culture and the formation of an optimal range of doctrinal and empirical sources used are formulated; the potential of using a number of practically oriented specific techniques of legal work in the study of manifestations of legal culture in legal reality is shown. It is summarized that the application of an interdisciplinary approach in the study of legal culture in the modern historical period, characterized by the expansion and deepening of the interrelationships of various fields of knowledge and types of practical activities, the “erasing” of clear boundaries between them, is not only desirable, but also a necessary technique to achieve a scientifically sound and practically effective result of the undertaken research, which ensures the proper level of its scientific novelty and relevance for application in legal practice and further increment of scientific and practical knowledge.

The article examines the problem of correlation of human rights and solidarity in the Russian legal system. It reveals the correlation of the concepts of human rights and solidarity in certain socio-political movements, including socialism, liberalism, and Catholic reformism. The author analyzes the main ways of enshrining human rights and solidarity as constitutional and legal values in the constitutions of foreign states. The article considers constitutionalization of the principle of solidarity in the context of the constitutional reform of 2020. It concludes that the balance of human rights and solidarity within the Russian legal system is predetermined by the shift in emphasis within the discourse of human rights from an individualistic approach to a collective one. Both human rights and solidarity are part of the values that construct the Russian legal system and they do not contradict each other.

The issues of improving the entrepreneurial legislation of the Russian Federation through its codification are considered. In historical terms, the problems of codification of economic legislation were studied by scientists of the economic law sector of the Institute of State and Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences under the leadership of V. V. Laptev, projects were developed the USSR Economic Code (draft basic provisions) 1970; Fundamentals of economic legislation of the USSR 1975; Economic Code of the USSR 1984; Entrepreneurial Code of the Russian Federation 1994. The need to adapt the Entrepreneurial Code of the Russian Federation is currently obvious: entrepreneurial legislation is huge, voluminous, extremely mobile, non-systematic, does not have a single core, etc., and its codification is the best way to improve it, incomparable in efficiency either with its consolidation or with its incorporation. The main attention is paid to the current problems of codification of entrepreneurial legislation in the Russian Federation. Briefly considered codified acts in the field of entrepreneurial relations of those states – the former Union republics of the USSR, where they are. Attention was paid to the need for conceptual study of fundamental – for the draft Entrepreneurial Code of the Russian Federation – problems: separation of entrepreneurial relations from related ones; determining the limits of the subject of entrepreneurial legal relations subject to codification; peculiarities of individual institutions of entrepreneurial law (control and supervisory activities; property rights; protection of business rights, primarily in the field of critical technologies; territorial entities with a special legal regime of entrepreneurial activity; strategic documents on economic development for the future, etc.), the structure of the code from the standpoint of its systematic construction. According to the author, the scientific development of the draft of this Code should be carried out within the framework of the state order, with a preliminary solution of these conceptual problematic issues.

The article discusses conceptual issues: the concept and content of wages, legal regulation of wages, basic state guarantees for remuneration, remuneration in special conditions.

Legal regulation of integrated use of natural resources was actively developing in the early period of formation of Environmental Law. With the adoption of the Federal Law “On Environmental Protection”, the text of which does not mention integrated use of natural resources, the importance of this legal institution has significantly decreased. Regulation of integrated use of natural resources is carried out in the subjects of the Russian Federation and is provided for by a number of strategic planning documents at the federal, regional, and local levels. In the context of frequent problems in practice associated with ensuring the use of several types of natural resources at once, it is recommended to develop the potential of integrated use of natural resources. This institution needs to be rethought and can be especially successful in regulating natural resource relations, rather than relations on environmental protection, as was envisaged in the legislation in the past.

The article examines the most significant challenges to national security in modern conditions of the world order transformation, which include destructive informational and psychological impact, large-scale falsification of history, fake news, propaganda of misanthropy, russophobia, manipulation of the spiritual sphere using social engineering, promotion of the cult of consumption in the mass media and stereotypes that reduce a person’s ability to think critically, inculcation of legal nihilism, hatred and hostility towards state authorities, pejorative attitude to the idea of patriotism, etc. The techniques of aggressive destructive influence on the worldview and cognitive-mental sphere of a person in the information space are camouflaged under the promotion of innovative technologies, including using artificial intelligence, pseudoscientific theories, alien cultural concepts. Their veiling requires creation of adequate mechanisms for searching, detecting, fixing, removing and investigating traces of criminally destructive communicative activity using information technology and the development of modern forensic techniques to prevent and neutralize mental and cognitive attacks on information and ideological security in order to protect national spiritual values. Criminalistics is considered by the author as a theoretical and applied basis that makes it possible to identify, neutralize and effectively prevent criminal hybrid threats in order to ensure national security in mass media.

In order to determine the directions of evolution of the legal model of financial relations for the established perspective, the article examines the problems of applying private law structures in financial relations; special attention is paid to the study of administrative and legal aspects of money supply management, as well as to the study of problems in the field of the emergence and fulfillment of financial obligations that ensure the functioning of the monetary mechanism of the state. The use of general logical research methods, including analysis and synthesis, formal legal and comparative legal methods allowed the authors to come to the conclusion that in order to avoid the process of degradation of legal institutions that are important for the functioning of the financial mechanism of the state, the formation of an integrative legal model of financial relations should be accompanied by work to harmonize private and public law methods of regulation; legal regulation of financial obligations, on the one hand, should be aimed at creating conditions for the development of investment activity of business entities, and on the other, at strengthening guarantees for the implementation of a person’s right to manage finances; in order to create an effective mechanism for managing the money supply, there is an urgent need to develop a legal structure that ensures the integration of monetary, budget and fiscal policies, contributing to strengthening the level of guarantees of financial stability of the Russian Federation; to create a qualitatively new level of legal support for monetary circulation, it seems appropriate to improve the mechanism for controlling the movement of capital through the creation of “financial customs”, the role of which can be performed by the Bank of Russia with the help of legal tools that ensure the integration of the circulation of cryptocurrencies into the financial system of the state, as well as control over internal and external ruble market.

The article is dedicated to the 100^th anniversary of the birth of a prominent Soviet and Russian lawyer and philosopher of law, Doctor of Law, Honored Professor of the Lomonosov Moscow State University Oleg Ernestovich Leist (1925–2003). O. E. Leist made a significant contribution to legal science by posing general theoretical problems of understanding law and its essential characteristics, including: normativity, official establishment and protection by the state, systematicity, formal certainty, justice and authority; development of the topic of sanctions and legal responsibility; assessment of the essence of the state and demonstration of the connection between law and the state at various stages of social development.

The article examines the Russian model of the application of international law rules in the national legal system under resolving civil law cases, taking into account modern challenges and the need to ensure the state sovereignty of the Russian Federation. Based on the works of Soviet scholars who paid considerable attention to the issues of interaction between international and national law, in the development of the theory of transformation, it seeks the domestic mechanism for fulfilling international obligations of states and the inclusion of international law norms in the Russian legal system. It is argued that such an order should be established by the Russian Federation independently according to its internal rules based on the supremacy of the Constitution of the Russian Federation with the establishment of public order and national super imperative rules (overriding norms of direct application) as grounds for refusing to apply particular norms of International Law to civil law relations in exceptional cases, which should be done on the basis of an intersectoral approach, providing for systemic changes in the current legislation of the Russian Federation concerning the clear hierarchy of various sources of International and Russian law among themselves with the use of the restrictive interpretation of Article 15 (4) of the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

Deepening of integration process in EAEU is said to be the first-rate current prerogative for cooperation development in the framework of this regional organization. The retention of state sovereignty in supranational environment appears to be the key factor for further movement in specified direction. The article is devoted to the study of state as a member of EAEU in its relation to the core component of the Union’s legal system, that is its law, including treaties with third states and Union’s acts. In addition, some disputable problems relating to the ideological component of this system are subjected to discussion.

The article examines the activities of the U. S. Supreme Court under the chairmanship of Earl Warren. Such issues as the “constitutional revolution” committed by the Warren Court, the ratio of judicial activism and “legal restraint” in its decisions, and the periodization of its activities are considered. The Warren Court has largely given an expansive interpretation to the institutions of civil rights and freedoms, the judiciary, and the federal level of government. This court, through a series of rulings, approved the principle of “one person, one vote” in US electoral law and created the Miranda rule.

The validity of the termination of the “legal life” of an individual and the termination of his legal capacity is traditionally one of the cornerstones of domestic civilistics. A superficial perception of the institution of recognizing a citizen as deceased without deep understanding can be the basis for abuse of law. This postulate determined the choice of the topic of this study. The purpose of the study: to determine the moment of termination of the legal capacity of a person in a terminal state; to study the issue of recognizing a citizen who is being prosecuted as deceased in court. The objectives of the study are to determine the legal difficulties in determining the moment of termination of legal capacity of certain categories of individuals, to justify the need for unification of law enforcement in the field of termination of legal capacity. In addition to the general dialectical method, the work uses both general theoretical (mainly analysis, synthesis, system-logical) and specific scientific methods of cognition (historical, legal-analytical). In this paper, based on the analysis of the interpretation of current legal norms governing the moment of termination of legal capacity, specific proposals for the unification and uniform application of provisions on the termination of the legal capacity of an individual are formulated. The validity of the refusal to declare a citizen deceased in court, whose unknown absence is associated with the commission of a crime and the initiation of a criminal case, is motivated.

On April 9, 2025, the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences hosted the International Scientific Conference “New human rights and new aspects of the content and realization of traditional rights”. The Conference was attended by representatives of leading scientific institutions and universities of Russia, researchers from Belarus and Uzbekistan. They discussed issues related to the development of the content, methods of the human rights realization and protection in the context of modern civilizational challenges, as well as the processes of formation of new rights and their subjects.

The reviewers analyse a book published in early 2025, which is actually a collective monograph prepared by a group of authors, most of whom are experts in the regulation of artificial intelligence. The book reveals the main issues related to the use of artificial intelligence and the legal problems arising as a result. This book is part of the Cambridge Handbooks of Law series, the publications of which are comprehensive scholarly reviews of the most topical legal topics. The reviewers consistently characterise all three parts of the book, the first on the ethics and philosophy of AI, the second on AI law and policy, and the third on the application of AI in various fields.