Great, judicial reform as a factor in the formation of legal thinking of the Russian lawyers

The article analyzes the modern problems of legal professional thinking in modern Russia caused by the transitional state and certain instability of the legislation, changes in the tasks and content of legal education, the pluralism of legal understanding of representatives of different legal schools and areas of jurisprudence, national peculiarities of legal mentality and legal consciousness of the population and the professional community of lawyers. Similar problems, complicated by the immaturity of the legal profession and legal education in the Russian Empire of the pre-reform period, were known in Russian history. The author’s comparative legal analysis revealed these similarities and the main factor that determined the way and means of formation of professional legal thinking, in particular, as well as the new legal consciousness of both individual and social, and group (i.e. professional legal community), in General, in the post-reform period. The values of the new organization of justice, the development and defense of their lawyers of the new formation contributed to the solution of these problems. A special role in this process belonged to the new impetus for the development of legal doctrine, based not only on the borrowing of ideas and doctrines of the West, but also the formation of national concepts based on a combination of recognized as universal Western and traditional religious and moral domestic values, characterized by pluralism of approaches to the understanding of law and the state and their relationship. The new judicial legislation, the very creative process of its application, in turn, did not influence the formation of new legal thinking. The legal community was United in professional corporations, both official — councils of attorneys at law and informal — law societies at universities, which in turn contributed to the promotion of new legal values, combining the efforts of lawyers, practitioners, scientists and teachers. Such cooperation has undoubtedly benefited the jurisprudence of theoretical and practical Study and the use of domestic historical experience in this area can be useful for solving today’s problems related to legal thinking.