Publications

Globalization is not a descriptive term to depict the contemporary realities of law; it works mainly as a regulatory conception to affirm certain regularities of social evolution to be respected by scholars, lawyers, and politicians. The reflections about law in the era of globalization do not represent law as it is, but rather prescribe which law is needed for mankind to meet the perils of our changing times. Unanimously rejecting the Hobbesian model, the pluralists depict human societies as self-organizing entities capable of producing their own autonomous regulation, independent of the will and discretion of particular individuals. The phenomena summed under the title of legal pluralism have neither historical nor social originality as such. Legal pluralism does not reveal new social laws or regularities, it does not provide new explicative schema (rather it merely changes the words in the older schema), and the challenges of globalization are only relatively new. Rather the reality referred to through these terms outlines a renewed intellectual climate which offers new axes for discourses. From this point of view, the problem of legal pluralism, and the issue of globalization are not devoid of scientific interest, and discussions on this matter can effectively contribute to the progress of social knowledge. But, in all probability, one cannot reasonably expect that from replacing terms and factual data one can gain innovative knowledge about the interrelation of law and society.

This volume examines the elements of formalism and decisionism in Russian legal thinking and, also, the impact of conservatism on the interplay of these elements. The actual conservative narratives, about the distinctiveness of Russian law, reveal certain features of the intellectual culture that is transmitted in legal education, scholarship and practice. These narratives are based on the idea of sovereignty understood as legal omnipotence of the state. References to sovereignty justify the requirement of legality in the sense of fidelity to the letter of the law. They also often serve as a rationale for crafting exceptions to constitutional non-discrimination principles as they are applied to political, religious, sexual and other minorities.

This chapter examines how Russians justify wars in the post-Soviet era. As will be shown, the Russian philosophical tradition developed somewhat differently from that of the West. Neither in Imperial Russia, nor during the Soviet period, did secular writers pay much attention to issues related to the justification of war. Meanwhile the Russian Orthodox Church tended to view war as an occasionally necessary lesser evil, not as something which can be characterized as ‘just’. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, political leaders have tended to adopt a Realist approach and to frame war in terms of security rather than justice. Church leaders and secular intellectuals have on occasion referred to Russia’s wars as 'just' and made some reference to Western just war principles, but they have not for the most part endorsed those principles fully. It remains to be seen whether Russian thought on this issue will converge with that of the West or diverge further from it.

This paper studies the development of economic analysis of law in Soviet and Russian law, and a number of factors influencing this development. In Soviet law, the influence of economics on law was theoretically conceived in terms of Marxist dialectics of basis and superstructure. When Russia left the USSR in 1991, judges had to evaluate whether application of Soviet legal rules would make sense or whether there were compelling economic reasons to decide cases otherwise. The privatization and other economic reforms of Yeltsin’s Government were carried out  with the help of rather inconclusive and inefficient legislation. In the 2000s, the economic analysis of law gained momentum in Russian law: an entire branch of the judiciary (commercial or arbitration courts) supported its application. After the Higher Commercial (Arbitrazh) Court was disbanded in 2014, Russian law is becoming formalistic again; references to economic analysis of law are rare both in case law and in legal scholarship. The author explains this development in the prism of the governmental centralization policies which imply that judges shall be guided only by the sovereign (state) will, without attempting to reinterpret or cast doubts on this will from the standpoint of economic rationality or from other standpoints.

In secular societies, the principle of rule of law implies that churches and other social institutions may not assert themselves as above the law or replace the official law1 with their moral or canon rules. Abiding by this principle is a problem not only for the Russian Orthodox Church, but also for many other religious denominations that historically have carried considerable sway over social and political life in their countries by way of their “moral entrepreneurship” and that are now reluctant to cede that influence.

The question of what is to be considered as legal and antilegal is one of the central questions of legal philosophy. However, its relevance is not restricted to philosophical reasoning only—the dichotomy of legal/antilegal leads to a wide range of discussions in legal science, especially in the field of constitutional law. Political science is involved in these discussions too, since law can be instrumentalized as a means of carrying out political will. The content of this will can be evaluated as to its compliance with certain ethical principles. In this perspective, one can as well examine whether legal norms issued by holders of political power comply with such principles.

The relations of the Russia and Britain with the self-declared state of Yettishar was a striking example of different approaches of two empires to the states and peoples of the Central Asian regions within so called “Great Game’, i.e. Russo-English rivalry in the 19th c. The trade treaties of Yattishar with the Russian Empire of 1872 and with the British Empire in 1874 became a legal reflection of these approaches and are of great interest within the context of the historical experience of the legal status of unrecognized states and positions of the rival “world powers” towards such states. The purpose of the article is a historical-legal analysis of above-mentioned treaties and comparative-legal analysis of them with the similar treaties signed by Russia and England with other Central Asian states during the same period. Author attempts to clarify if treaties of 1872 and 1874 confirmed recognition by both empires of Yettishar as a subject of international relations and how these legal documents reflected confrontation of Russia and England in the region. The study is mainly based on the formal-legal, historical legal and comparative-legal methods. Also author used the methods of legal anthropology and general history. The results of the research to a certain extant correlate with modern approaches in the policy of Russian and western powers in Central Asia in terms of political situation in the region as well as political, legal and cultural traditions of Central Asian states and peoples.

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In his 2020 book "Hans Kelsen. A Biography of a Jurist," Professor Thomas Olechowski of the University of Vienna attempts to understand how life conditions may have shaped the theoretical ideas and personality of Hans Kelsen in general. This thousand-page monograph is a remarkable synthesis of the research work done in this area. On the one hand, it includes a large stratum of new biographical material that Professor Olekhovsky and his colleagues have collected over 15 years of research: archival sources, interviews with Kelsen's contemporaries, and correspondence. On the other hand, it synthesizes previous studies that have been undertaken in the scholarly literature both on Kelsen's biography and on the analysis of his views. 

The book is the first research in the Russian scholarly tradition of accounts, notes and memoirs of Russian and Western travelers who visited Mongolia in 17th to early 20th century as a sources on traditional state and law of the Mongols. The authors of notes were diplomats and intelligence officers, scientists and merchants, missionaries and even “extreme tourists.” Using their notes gave an opportunity to form a view on different aspects of power and legal relations in Mongolia. Diverse goals of trips to Mongolia caused visits of foreign contemporaries to various regions of Mongolia at different stages of their political and legal development. The analysis of that sources allows to create the “legal map” of Mongolia during the period of independent khanates and under the power of the Manchu dynasty of Qing including specific features of the legal status of the Northern Mongolia (Khalkha), Southern (Inner) Mongolia and the Zunghar Khanate which was independent state till the mid of the 18th c. The research is based on the analysis of about 200 texts written by travelers as well as on additional materials on history of foreign travels to Mongolia, on persons of travelers themselves. This approach allowed to form an impartial position on the notes and to analyze them critically.
The book is designed for specialists in the field of history of state and law, comparative legal studies, legal and political anthropology, historians, mongolists, specialists in source study, political scientists and ethnographers. It also could be an additional material for students who study these specialties.

Using a communicative approach and linguistic researches, the article proves that there may be various models of communication between government and society, but not all of them may lie in the basis of truly legal communication. It is founded that truly legal communication is based on the principle of mutual legal recognition – recognition of the equal legal personality of each other by participants in legal communication. This principle can only be realized within the framework of a dialogue symmetric communication model. All other models (one-sided, two-sided asymmetric, pseudo- and quasicommunication) are deformations of legal communication, the “inferiority” of which arises due to inadequate interpretation, lack of desire of subjects to reach mutual understanding or inferiority of one of the subjects of communication. It is shown that in order to change the legal ideology in Post-Soviet Russia we should use a partnership strategy – dialogue symmetric communication between state power and society, a theoretical basis for which it is possible to develop within the framework of the legal communication theory.

Bronislav L. Grombchevskiy, a Russian military officer, traveler and later a high rank official, was the first European who gave a detailed description of the state of Hunza, or Kandjut (today a district within Pakistan). He describes its political system, legal relations, geology and zoology, climatology, etc. Grombchevskiy’s information on the organization of his reception at the court of Sadar-Ali Khan, the ruler of Hunza, as a representative of the Russian Empire is of great interest. The traveler describes the ceremonial in detail, including the long negotiations on the protocol, mutual pretensions and concessions of the Russian representative and Hunza officials, their intention to reach a compromise and, at the same time, not to lose the prestige of their states. The article provides a comparative analysis of the diplomatic protocol in Hunza and similar ceremonies at the courts of Central Asian rulers (e.g. the Emirate of Bukhara or Khanate of Khiva) described by Russian travelers of the nineteenth–early twentieth centuries, which allows to see a substantial sameness of diplomatic protocol in the countries of Central Asia.

The research focuses on the place and role of public organizations in Soviet Russia in the 1920s. The empirical basis of the research is archival materials and normative legal acts on the activities of agricultural societies. The author notes that agricultural societies, like other voluntary societies, were liquidated in the late 1920s. This circumstance allows concluding that all the processes that took place with other public organizations at this time were reflected in the functioning of agricultural societies. From 1917 to the early 1920s, pre-revolutionary agricultural societies were involved in the work of Soviet bodies. In 1922, the NKVD began to register agricultural societies. In 1923, an attempt was made to provide special legal regulation of their activities. Placing agricultural societies in a separate category of public organizations, in fact, continued the pre-revolutionary tradition since these societies again received separate legal regulation. However, this approach was soon abandoned, and agricultural societies were again subject to general regulation. In the late 1920s, the process of Sovietization of the public sector began. The reasons for the liquidation of agricultural societies were: poor cultural work; poor financial condition; lack of all-Russian coverage, and others. Similar reasons for the closure were contained in other resolutions on the closure of public organizations of this period. Important in this time is the general attitude of the Soviet government to establish control over agriculture. The creation of local land departments, the Michurin Movement, propaganda work in the village, collectivization – all these activities displaced the public initiative. The state and the party aspired to the sole leadership of agriculture. Thus, the liquidation of agricultural organizations became a reflection of two interrelated processes. On the one hand, it was a process of suppressing civil initiative and identifying state and party interests with public ones. On the other hand, it was the process of building an administrative and command management system in agriculture. For this reason, peasants lost creativity in their work and their interest in the result. Agricultural societies lost their target audience: the initiative peasant. Therefore, in the conditions of socio-cultural transformation and etatisation of the legal and political system of the Soviet state, voluntary agricultural societies were simply not needed.

The article analyzes from the historical and legal point of view the information from the lives of Michael Vsevolodovich of Chernigov, who was killed in the Golden Horde in 1246, and Roman Olegovich of Ryazan, who died in 1270. The author makes an attempt to identify the elements of a Golden Horde trial, relying on the information from these sources and their correlation with other sources of information about trials in the Mongol Empire and the Golden Horde. On the basis of the analyzed information of a procedural nature, the author also makes a suggestion about how the real historical events of the 13th century were reflected in the lives.

The purpose of this article is to inform the Russian reader about the Italian consumer protection against unfair contract terms established by both national autonomous regulation and the implemented EEC Directive No. 93/13/EEC. It focuses on the Directive itself, the Italian Civil and Consumer Codes (which are translated by the authors), as well as on the most important positions of Italian civil doctrine, Italian Court of Cassation and the European Court of Justice in order to understand the provisions of these regulatory acts. The work does not purport to be exhaustive or in-depth analysis, providing only a general overview of the Italian law on the relevant relations in comparison with Russian law. It may be useful for further comparative study of consumer law, a deeper understanding of the problem of protection against unfair contract terms in domestic law and respective improvement of jurisprudence and legislation.

The current article is the continuation of the previous article titled as “Significance of the Code of the Court of Territorial Affairs in regulation of procedural legal relations of Mongol vassals of Qing”. The current research examines procedural norms, contained in the legal monument, which are systematized into legal institutions, and principles of legal proceedings, which are formulated according to the provisions of the Code, as well.