The paper is devoted to the study of the essence and legal significance of post mortem facts for the emergence, change and termination of legal relations of a private legal nature (primarily family law and civil law). The author analyzes doctrinal approaches to this problem, relevant draft laws (regulating the legal protection of the rights and interests of spouses in special circumstances), the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, courts of general jurisdiction related to issues of establishing the fact of paternity of a child born out of wedlock; assumptions (prevention) of fixing parenthood based on the use of assisted reproductive technologies (including surrogacy) with the genetic material of the deceased man; the fact of being dependent as the basis of inheritance of the «surviving spouse». The study proposes options for a fairer and more reasonable legal construction of the legal consequences of this group of facts and conditions both within the framework of the current family and civil legislation, and for situations outside the impact of the law: adjusting the presumption of paternity (taking into account circumstances that obviously exclude it); clarification of regulatory provisions on unilateral recognition of paternity and the rules on its early declaration, on establishing the fact of paternity of a deceased person instead of recommendations of the highest court; prohibiting the use of the genetic material of the deceased man, unless there was an explicit will in the relevant lifetime agreement; expanding the regulatory framework for recognizing the legal consequences of post mortem actual marital relations.

The integration of artificial intelligence into the workplace is reshaping the employee-employer relationship, generally strengthening employers’ positions and complicating positions of workers. Until recently, AI deployment has been largely confined to applications with limited autonomy and to industrial and service robotics. By late 2024, however, leading technology firms announced the expected introduction of «virtual employees» in 2025, with the embodied virtual agents defined as autonomous intelligent systems capable of performing an expanding array of tasks, including many creative functions previously carried out by humans. Fueled by advances in generative AI, these agents are moving beyond gaming and virtual education into core economic activities. The capabilities of virtual employees risk exacerbating existing imbalances in labor relations and raise urgent questions for labor law. The study examines the legal challenges posed by embodied virtual agents and evaluates regulatory approaches to reconcile employers’ technological opportunities with the protection of workers’ social and labor rights.

The paper analyzes ownership interests recognized in continental legal systems that regulate occupancy of another person’s dwelling and develops several conclusions. In Russian civil law, the paradigmatic proprietary title governing the use of residential premises owned by another is the right to use residential premises, which arises from a testamentary disposition or from a lifelong maintenance contract with dependency, including cases, when the maintenance recipient retains the right to occupy the premises after their transfer to the payer under the contract. The study contends that both the transferor and the maintenance recipient acquire this ownership interest upon its state registration in the Unified State Register of Real Estate. In German law, the analogue is the right to a dwelling (Wohnrecht), which may arise from a testamentary disposition or from an agreement between the owner and an authorized occupant. A comparative analysis of the Russian right to use residential premises and the German right to a dwelling identifies their shared and distinguishing features by examining their objects, subjects, content, grounds for acquisition and termination, and the particularities of their exercise and protection.

The paper examines the potential of criminalistic science, understood as an applied legal discipline, to enhance mechanisms for combating crimes carried out using information and communication technologies (ICT). The key problems identified are: that ICT-mediated offender–victim communications occur remotely, that both the preparation and commission of offenses are carefully concealed, and that crime traces are often obscured by modern technologies. These factors create substantial difficulties for law enforcement in establishing offenders’ locations, identities, and other circumstances essential to detection, investigation, and prevention. While large-scale technical and legal measures at the state level are necessary, the authors argue that criminalists should also prioritize a multidimensional analysis of the communicative component of ICT-enabled crimes. The study finds that the prevailing media narrative that «anyone can become a victim of fraud» is counterproductive: it demoralizes citizens and hampers the identification and investigation of such offences. The paper recommends revising approaches to studying victims’ identities and developing targeted, specialized investigative methods for particular categories of ICT-enabled crimes in the context of digital transformation.

The paper presents the results of a doctrinal and comparative study of criminal legislation and practice concerning liability for cartel conduct, and analyzes the constituent elements (corpus delicti) of the relevant offence. It is shown that the legal object of the offence is the state of the market for goods, works and services, i.e., the institutional conditions that afford formally equal economic actors equal opportunities to obtain profit and enable consumers to choose among available offers. The double reference to «restrictions on competition» in Part 1 of Article 178 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation does not expand the catalogue of criminally relevant elements. The statutory disposition, which names the offence and describes the prohibited conduct, is formulated in general criminal-law terms, while the concrete content of the proscribed behavior is determined by sectoral economic regulation. The study further demonstrates that quantitative (value-based) thresholds (for example, the amount of income or benefit) are employed to assess the public danger of the act and to delimit administrative responsibility from criminal responsibility. Such thresholds indicate the scale of unlawful activity rather than merely its economic outcome, thereby imparting a criminal character to the conduct. The author emphasizes the relevance of actual «causing of damage:» competitor conduct (e.g., price-fixing, market-division, discriminatory contract terms) can inflict tangible harm on other market participants. Finally, the paper identifies and explicates several non-obvious qualifying elements of the offence under considertion.

The paper examines the role of additional penalties in the differentiation and individualization of punishment for environmental crimes and in the formation of ecocriminological security. It identifies a paucity of scholarly research on the effectiveness of additional penalties as a means of protecting the environment from criminal threats and therefore further study of threats in this area as promising. The study demonstrates an inconsistency between the legislative model governing the imposition of additional penalties and established judicial practice. Although more than half of the sanctions contained in Chapter 26 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation permit cumulative application, courts seldom exploit the potential of additional penalties. Notably, three quarters of the sanctions that provide for additional penalties appear in qualified forms of environmental offences; nevertheless, only about 5 % of those convicted of environmental crimes receive additional penalties. This disparity indicates the limited effect of additional penalties on the individualization of criminal liability in this field. Further, there is no uniform legislative model for differentiating criminal liability for environmental crimes with respect to the amount of additional penalty prescribed by the sanctions of Chapter 26. Median values for the same additional penalty differ under alternative cumulation options, reflecting problems in assessing the public danger posed by environmental offences. The study concludes that the existing statutory variations in the cumulation of penalties are clearly insufficient to achieve consistent and proportionate sentencing in environmental criminal law.

The paper substantiates the point of view according to which society’s satisfaction with state power and the public’s trust in it directly depend on the quality of the criminal proceedings, its effectiveness and its provision with real guarantees of fair justice. Here, the state faces the most pressing, urgent tasks in the field of protecting the rights, freedoms, interests of society and the individual. At the same time, society’s demand for justice comes to the fore. If it is satisfied, then criminal proceedings receive serious support and trust from citizens, and gain a high level of legitimacy. The same applies to relevant state institutions and the state as a whole. The government achieves a particularly high degree of such support if it ensures the real, direct participation of the population in the administration of justice — in resolving matters of national importance. It is proposed to consider a trial with the participation of jurors as one of the main indicators of the development of the Russian democratic state. The paper examines the problems of its real relevance on the part of the state and society, its ability to bring to life the conceptual and moral principles embedded in this institution. For methodological purposes, the jury trial is proposed to be considered as a kind of model of interaction between the state and society, primarily in matters of the real distribution of power between them here. Based on this, taking into account law enforcement practice, based on statistical research data, the author analyzes the weaknesses and defects of this form of legal proceedings. As a result, it is concluded that the state is not ready to fully entrust the authorities in the administration of justice to the population. Approaches to solving the identified problems and determining the vector of development of the Russian jury trial and the state as a whole are proposed.

Human welfare is ensured by administrative and legal means, however, the set of such means in legal research is not systematized and the definition of administrative and legal means is insufficiently elaborated. The lack of a clear systematization of administrative and legal means of ensuring welfare can cause legal uncertainty, violation of the principles of legality and legal protection, reduce the effectiveness of public administration and trust in the state, and entail corruption risks. Based on the analysis of scientific works and norms of administrative law, the paper establishes that the key administrative and legal means of ensuring human welfare are legal norms, legal relations, and acts of application of legal norms. It is proved that administrative and legal norms determine the effectiveness of the state’s activities to ensure human welfare. By regulating the rights and duties of entities, they ensure the unity of the management system and the optimization of public relations in the field of executive power. Administrative and legal relations are a tool for the practical implementation of relevant regulations. It has been established that in the context of modern challenges and threats, administrative acts play an increasingly important role in shaping the legal framework for socio-economic development and ensuring human welfare. The imperative nature of administrative and legal means helps to establish a balance between the government regulations of the state and ensuring guarantees of citizens’ rights and freedoms. Thus, the systematization of key means of ensuring human welfare makes it possible to eliminate legal uncertainty and increase the effectiveness of public administration in this area.

The paper examines the theoretical foundations of the procedural activities for the protection of competition carried out by antimonopoly authorities. The study analyzes issues of compliance with the principles of legality and transparency (openness) of the antimonopoly process, the sequence of administrative procedures, their predictability, formalism, and imperative nature as well as the active (investigative) role of the antimonopoly authority in the process. Particular attention is given to the specific content of administrative procedures for the protection of competition, expressed in the dualism of state bodies ensuring such protection, the unconditional consideration of the state of competition in the relevant market when making final procedural decisions, and the priority of preventive measures over punitive ones. These principles, rules, and limitations should form the basis of legal processes for implementing state antimonopoly control functions, including control over economic concentration, the granting of state and municipal preferences, inspections by antimonopoly authorities for compliance with antimonopoly legislation, consideration of cases concerning violations of antimonopoly legislation, complaints about violations of antimonopoly legislation, and complaints related to tender procedures. Adherence to these requirements ensures the effective application of substantive competition law norms aimed at protecting competition. A significant violation of these principles should result in the court recognizing the actions and decisions of the antimonopoly authorities as illegal.

The People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation are signatories to the 1961 International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants. This necessitates harmonization of legislation in relevant areas, though the legal system of each state exhibits its own characteristics and challenges. With the advancement of China’s agricultural modernization strategy, rights to new plant varieties, serving as a crucial legal safeguard for agricultural scientific and technological achievements, have become a key component of the national intellectual property system. The paper outlines the development of a system for the protection of new plant varieties in China, analyzes the main achievements and shortcomings of protection measures, pays special attention to the validity of restrictions on rights and legal conflicts of interests of farmers, and considers the possibility of expanding the scope of protection in China in the future. Currently, the system of protecting the rights to new plant varieties in China remains in conflict between the promotion and protection of innovations in plant breeding and the maintenance of public interests. In this regard, the development of China’s legal protection system for new plant varieties may involve improving legislation, clearly defining the boundaries of rights, and strengthening judicial oversight, thereby providing legal support for building a high-quality seed industry system and developing new productive forces. In the legal system of the Russian Federation, issues concerning the protection of new plant varieties include insufficient elaboration of the royalty collection model in legislation, imperfections in the methodology for conducting new variety trials, among others.

Intelligent investment advisors, who have become widespread in modern financial markets, have called into question the adequacy of the traditional legal regulation model, primarily focused on individual investment relationships. The algorithmization of investment recommendations and their scalable application have led to legally significant risks no longer being purely individual but manifesting at the level of the financial market itself. The algorithmic unification of investment strategies and automated execution of decisions result in the mass and synchronous execution of similar investment actions, which, under conditions of platform concentration, can amplify market fluctuations even with formal compliance with existing legal requirements. This reveals the structural limitations of regulatory logic, built solely around fiduciary responsibility and individual control. Based on a comparative analysis of the regulation of intelligent investment advisors in the United States, the European Union, and China, it is shown that, despite differences in institutional solutions, these legal systems generally go beyond the traditional private law approach to investment risk management. It is concluded that there is a need to shift the emphasis in legal regulation from an individual investment attitude to financial risk management, taking into account the objectives of financial security. This does not imply a weakening of investor protection but rather its integration into a broader mechanism for preventing systemic risks in financial markets.

The anti-Russian «sanctions» have led to the need for Russian business entities to use offshore companies to organize maritime transportation and the sale of petroleum products. From the point of view of private international law, these actions can be qualified as a special case of circumvention of law. In unfriendly countries, circumvention of anti-Russian «sanctions» is seen as an attempt to circumvent overriding mandatory rules (prevailing imperative provisions). The concept of the «shadow» fleet lacks a clear statutory definition, despite being referenced in the «sanctions» acts of unfriendly countries. The absence of a definition facilitates abuses by foreign regulators against vessels controlled by Russian entities. To overcome illegal «sanction» restrictions in international settlements for maritime transportation and cargo sales, Russian entities are forced to utilize multi-layered ownership structures for vessels through foreign jurisdictions and new payment instruments, which are wholly or partially subject to foreign legal systems. Due to the large-scale «sanctions», the theory of circumvention of law in private international law has acquired substantial empirical material that requires serious theoretical analysis.

This paper examines the role and significance of interstate associations such as the Belt and Road Initiative and BRICS within the context of the current crisis in the politico-economic system of interstate relations and institutions. They are characterized as new types of state associations that build relationships based on equality, mutual respect for national interests, mutually beneficial economic cooperation, and the resolution of economic disputes. The paper provides a detailed analysis of the concept and practical steps taken by China to establish the International Commercial Court of the People’s Republic of China under the Belt and Road Initiative. It explores the distinctive features and innovative solutions employed by the court to enhance the efficiency of resolving disputes involving individuals and organizations from member states. The paper concludes that it is both fundamentally possible and necessary to apply similar innovations to the institutions and procedures for handling commercial and investment disputes within BRICS, a topic that has recently gained significant traction in legal scholarship and practice. Proposals are being made on the organizational form and operating procedure of the BRICS International Center for the Settlement of Economic Disputes.