Legal Uncertainty in the context of the Foundations of Criminal Justice Transformation

Based on the analysis of the history of legal science and law enforcement practice, the paper considers the prerequisites for the conceptualization of the phenomenon of uncertainty in law. The author offers a historical and rational reconstruction of the transition from the everyday and practical experience of understanding uncertainty to the concept that allows us to formulate the principles of lawmaking and law enforcement that prohibit uncertainty in the law and court decisions. The author explicates the difference between the conceptualization of the phenomenon of uncertainty in the Russian legal literature and similar literature of the English-speaking world, where three different concepts are used to denote it: indeterminacy, vagueness and uncertainty. The paper analyzes the difficulties that arise in the implementation of the desire to integrate the system of Russian law into the legal space of the European Union, where the principle of legal certainty is one of the main instruments of integration. The author analyzes in detail the assessment of prospects and the significance of the principle of legal certainty in the practice of implementing the idea of the rule of law, and considers the paradoxes that arise in this case.

Examples from the practice of the European Court of Human Rights, when certain decisions are criticized because of non-compliance by lawmakers with the principle of legal certainty, confirm the essential importance of ideological and value bases in the systems of modern law. The paper examines the significance of the philosophical and theoretical-conceptual grounds for the inclusion of the general scientific concept of uncertainty in the private scientific methodology of legal research. The differences in the interpretation of the phenomenon of uncertainty in linguistics, physics, economics, philosophy, logic and other sciences are determined. It is concluded that it is necessary to attract funds and methods of interdisciplinary research for the further development of the theory of legal uncertainty.

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