Vol 7, No 3 (2020)

The development of production and distribution relations, which are forms of interaction among society and individuals, and social groups presupposes the adequate development of procedural legal means for ensuring (implementing and protecting) the constitutional rights of participants in these relations. As is well known, the socioeconomic conditions of human society development provide new sources and means of judicial evidence. The task of justice is to provide participants in a judicial dispute with a legal opportunity to use acceptable judicial evidence in accordance with the procedures established by law. This study analyzes the judicial practice of using information from the messenger chat in court proceedings and formulates rules for using the messenger chat and screenshots as an acceptable judicial proof. Among these rules, the following should be noted: mandatory identification of the message recipient, identification of the true will of the message sender, coordination of the order of sending messages via messenger chat, etc.

The article discusses the opinion of scientists about the attribution of a screenshot to written or electronic evidence.

Considerable attention is paid to the problem of using correspondence in the messenger chats as a source of judicial evidence in resolving labor disputes.

The authors made a final conclusion about the positive attitude of Russian courts to the use of information from the messenger chats as a legal source of judicial evidence. The rules of their application warrant attention.

The study analyzed the principles of interaction between the national legal system such as the reception of law. The reception of law, being a cultural phenomenon of social progress, occurs in a specific social environment backed up by the growing political, economic, social, and legal integration. It serves as a significant factor of mutual enrichment with universal human values. The process is governed by certain methodological prerequisites, such as principles validated by the objective evolution of nature and society.

The research is based on the systemic approach to legal phenomena and the dialectical method, which calls for their study in being, functioning, and development. The meaning and significance of the widely used categories of the legal discourse of social phenomena, such as methodology, interaction, and movement, have been analyzed. Among the variety of movement interpretations, the most fruitful one in the legal science is the extended interpretation by Hegel and its identification with sublation in the dialectical method, emphasizing the unity of movement and legal matter. Such understanding of movement necessitates permanent improvement of the legal system and search for conditions and ways of its stable functioning in the existing external environment.

The author notes the possible applications of natural sciences principles, such as Le Chatelier’s principle and Prigogine’s principle of minimum entropy production, reflecting the facts of stability and directionality of the establishment of a new stability in the reviewed system and other open system interactions.

A set of methodological principles of interaction between national legal systems have been formulated based on the systemic approach and the natural sciences achievements that allow to understand the stability factors of a legal system and the internal reaction of a legal system and its external environment during the reception of law.

The features of the manifestations of hybrid wars were investigated by examples of its action in certain sectors of science, education, economics, finance, and criminal law. Certain characteristics of actions and events have been identified as elements of a hybrid war and not as random events.

The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation does not contain the necessary articles that would allow sufficient legal protection of the rights of citizens and the interests of the state from the actions and consequences of hybrid wars. In general, the criminal law system is not ready to identify and classify events as elements of a hybrid war, repel hybrid war attacks and waging confrontation, and work on the initial preemption and prevention of hybrid wars.

This article, which is proposed to be introduced into the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, reveals the concept of hybrid war and provides its full definition in a new article.

In conclusion, criminal legal measures and the possibilities of only the criminal legal system cannot solve the problems of confrontation in hybrid wars, and involvement of all the forces and resources of the state is necessary.

A proposal was made on the need to move to organizing the work of Russian law enforcement agencies on new principles: preemptive and prevention of hybrid wars instead of merely identifying their consequences and fragmentary application of criminal punishment for actions that are insignificant in comparison to the scale and damage caused by a hybrid war.

The article considers the Soviet dissertation theoretical and legal doctrines as a scientific category with a set of specific features. The author draws attention to the fact that the massive layer of legal theoretical knowledge known as Soviet jurisprudence and the legal teachings reflecting the evolution of Soviet law are insufficiently studied in ontological and epistemological terms. In specific, the role, place, and significance of Soviet dissertation legal theoretical teachings are lacking in the literature. Moreover, the Marxist methodology of legal knowledge, which should be used in modern educational and scientific space, lacks clear assessment. The author analyzes the most important thesis on the theory of law, which reflect the ontological and methodological foundations of the Soviet law and legal theory presented in the theses. This article lays the basis and the vector of further development of Soviet jurisprudence. These dissertation doctrines are analyzed to further use them in the scientific research of laws and trends in the development of Soviet legal thought. The results of these analyses are crucial for the history of political and legal doctrines, general theory of law, and philosophy of law and can be used in other areas of legal (including industry) science, considering their interdisciplinary heuristic potential.

In civil theory, the concept of dispositive legal regulation and its relationship with legal, normative, individual, autonomous, decentralized, self-regulating regulation has not been created. Modern civil scientists are faced with the task of creating a holistic teaching about the content, forms, and means of this unique phenomenon.

The appearance of article 210.1 in the criminal law caused an active discussion in the scientific community and many critical comments. Supporting the idea of the legislator about the need to strengthen the fight against organized crime by criminal legal means, the author notes the failure of the wording used in this norm, the complexity of its practical application, and the violation of the fundamental principles of legality, justice, and guilt. These criticisms are analyzed using the criminal legal approach, which allows projecting the provisions of the criminal law on the criminological plane. Thus, the highest position in the criminal hierarchy, being a special feature of crime, characterizes its social status within the framework of criminal interactions. In addition, the status and role characteristics of the subject have the value of the criminal’s personal characteristics. Given the criminological doctrine of the criminal, the author formulates the concept of the individual special subject of the crime as a specific sociocriminological personality type characterized, as a rule, a high degree of public danger, which is based on the relationship between the social status and role of the offender with criminal threats, a wide range of victimization, criminal commitment, legal nihilism, and capabilities and skills to counteract the preliminary investigation. In support of this definition, the author analyzes the features of the sociodemographic and value-normative subsystems of the personality of a special subject of crime and argues for the relationship with the personality of the criminal as a private with a general one. Justifying the typologization of the personality of a special subject of crime into «socialized» and «non-socialized» types, the author refers to the second person who occupies the highest position in the criminal hierarchy.

This study соnsidеrs thе fоrmаtiоn оf соrruрtiоn-rеlаtеd сrimеs аs а fоrm оf соuntеrасtiоn tо сrimе invеstigаtiоn, fеаturеs оf its рrеtriаl invеstigаtiоn, and thе fоrmаtiоn оf сеrtаin thеоrеtiсаl рrоvisiоns оf thе fоrеnsiс dосtrinе аbоut оvеrсоming thе соuntеrасtiоn tо сrimе invеstigаtiоns.

The article substantiates the need to change the criminal procedural legislation that regulates the powers of the prosecutor and the status of the victim and gives the prosecutor the right to initiate a criminal case. The proposed changes in the procedural powers of the prosecutor are also considered through the prism of organizing the activities of law enforcement agencies and the impact of statistical reporting indicators on their activities. The experience of prosecutorial and investigative practices and the opinion of distinguished domestic legal scholars are analyzed. The changes proposed by the authors could have a significant positive impact on the work of preliminary investigation bodies and reduce the number of violations committed during preliminary investigation stages. In addition, bringing the status of the prosecutor and the preliminary investigation bodies into a logical procedural position could eliminate unnecessary and inherently harmful corporate competition.