Russian Legal Mentality: Procedural Law vs. Customary People’s Justice

Russian customary law is a unique source for the study of the Russian traditional legal mentality. It is a kind of a cast from the people’s “instinctive right-feeling” (I. A. Ilyin), a product, a repository and at the same time a generator of legal mental attitudes. The results of research in the field of cognitive linguistics confirm the connection between thought processes and language. The author proceeds from the fact that the national language is an appropriate basis; and the means of linguistics are an effective tool for studying the national legal culture, legal mentality, legal consciousness. The paper describes separate approaches to the interpretation of the concepts of “mentality” and “mindset”, proposes a definition of the concept of “Russian legal mentality” and identifies the category of those possessing it.

The procedures for considering and resolving cases according to the norms of secret, written, pre-reform (before 1864) and post-reform (after the Judicial Reform of 1864) process, fixed by positive law (legislation), not only in form, but also in the approach itself, differed significantly from the traditions of popular justice as a “branch” of Russian customary law.

The main attitudes of the Russian traditional legal mentality are described in procedural aspects that are significant for the perception of law and legislation. Russian traditional legal mentality is reconstructed in order to identify the key mental attitudes inherent in the tradition of Russian customary law, in contrast with the approaches natural for the Western legal tradition. This is done in the context of the following phenomena: the ideal of justice, procedural order, legal qualification, the value of evidence, the purpose and result of justice.

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