It is proposed to form the constitutional and civilistic foundations of the general legal theory of organizational and property relations. Oleg E. Kutafin was a forrunner of the formation of such foundations. Organizational and property relations are gathered into a uniform binary paradigm. Immanent (inalienable) rights by their nature include only certain legal organizational rights (the right to judicial protection, the right to relief in court, etc.). The presence of subjective inalienable rights in a number of organizational relations once again emphasizes that within the framework of the universal binary paradigm “the organizational — the property”, the property relations possess special ontological continuation of organizational relations. The organizational and property criteria should be taken as two opposite functional manifestations of organization as an essential characteristic of social relations. These two incarnations do not compromise the integrity because their difference does not go into the denial of the essence of any of the social relations. Property, as a phenomenon of a specific nature, overcomes the manifestation of the organization as a phenomenon of a general nature. However, property acts as a legal description of certain legal rights, responsibilities, relationships similar to organization, publicity, etc. The definition of the property relation as the relation regarding material, physical object has introductory-anticipatory value rather than root or essential one. Alienability of legal rights can be of two types: 1) ability to be withdrawn (the ability to be alienated to someone else by force, without discretion or right-holder’s consent); 2) transferability (the ability to be transfered to someone else at the discretion of the right-holder). A negotiable legal right and (or) obligation of at least one of the participants in the relationship indicates that this social relationship is a property relationship, not organizational one. All other signs of the property relation (compensatory nature, etc.) are auxiliary and do not play an attributive role in qualifying the relation as a property relation.

The article deals with a number of problems associated with the transition to a new technological order has acquired the name of the 4th technological revolution in modern literature. The author focuses on changes that are take place in the organization of production and exchange of values. An attempt is made to forecast the development of the modern Russian society in the most important areas: economic, social, and spiritual. The author highlights the role of digital technologies in the modernization of the system of social regulation. There is a peculiar tendency of “technologization” of law, its transformation in the conditions of development of modern technologies. It is necessary to revise the recently established approaches to legal education. It is stated that rapid quantitative and qualitative changes that characterize the modern era, require a reorientation of education, which should be aimed at the extraction and assimilation of new knowledge that can be secured on the ground of a firm academic basis.

The article is devoted to analyzing conceptual shifts in the description and explanation of the phenomenon of law. The subject of the science of law constitutes the category of changing mental, linguistic and conceptual forms of its existence and expression. The development of the science of law is subject to the cultural and historical logic of evolution both as a phenomenon of law and the language of reasoning regarding law. The evolution of the phenomenon of law and the evolution of the science of law take place in a complex and dynamic environment of institutional and conceptual changes and mutual influences. Legal reality as a social fact and the concept of the fact exists within the cultural and historical boundaries of the interaction between the language of legal practice and the language of legal theory.

Understanding of legal reality as a linguistic reality (phenomenon) requires the development of mental models (epistems) that allow us to identify the most significant aspects of manifestations of legal reality in a variety of socio-cultural contexts of its linguistic — institutional (practical) and conceptual (theoretical) — expression. The current agenda covers the formation of the general body of the theory of jurisprudence per se, or jurisprudence of the judiciary. Its analytical basis forms theoretical history of the legal science presented in various cultural and historical forms and expressions of the legal knowledge.

The authors raise issues concerning the factors that determine compliance with the acts of “soft law” by participants of social interactions. At the same time, soft law is defined as a set of formalized general rules (norms, principles, criteria, standards) that do not have a legally binding nature, are not provided with official sanctions and are observed voluntarily due to the authority of their makers, the interest of the addressees and targeted social “pressure” that is put by the community on potential (and actual) violators. A key issue that arises in the context of “soft law” is whether law can exist without state coercion? If soft law is not secured by sanctions of a public-power nature, how is its binding character (validity) maintained? Is state coercion — in the form of direct violence or its threat — an attribute of a legal norm? The inclusion (or non-inclusion) of “soft law” norms in national legal systems, their application by courts and other law enforcement bodies, the authority and attractiveness of soft law as a regulatory system, etc., depend on the solution of these questions. Acts of “soft law” formally do not belong to the sources of law, do not contain legally binding provisions backed by state sanctions, but have some legal significance (sometimes essential) and sometimes — legal consequences. Ultimately, the authors conclude that by its nature, “soft law” per se is not legally binding, but the facts of universal recognition and application (primarily by the courts and other law enforcement agencies) give soft law instruments de facto binding character.

The paper is devoted to the scientific and practical apprehension of implementation of a new contractual design substantiating a complex obligation, namely, an escrow agreement, and its separation from similar civil law designs (such as escrow account, nominal account, storage, letter of credit, depositing of funds and securities to the notary public, etc.). Prior to introducing the escrow agreement, its existence in the property turnover was actually enforced by the escrow account rules introduced into civil law during the reform of the law of obligations. There is a close legal relationship between the escrow agreement (escrow) and the escrow account arising from the “contingency” of the obligation in question, but civilistic institutions under consideration are not identical. Its independence from the banking sector is considered to be an absolute advantage of the escrow agreement, as opposed to both the escrow account and the other securing financial mechanisms (such as a letter of credit, a safe deposit box lease agreement, etc.) in which the leading role belongs to banking organizations that are suffering crisis situations at the present stage of the existence of the Russian banking system. The United States are the ancestral home of the legal relations of obligations constructed in compliance with the model of the escrow agreement. Probably, this explains the term “escrow” that is absolutely strange for the Russian legal terminological framework and that is a synonym for the escrow agreement. Attention is drawn to the implementation of this contractual design for the needs of electronic business in the conditions of large-scale digitalization of the Russian legal and economic systems. The author concludes that the escrow agreement is able to organically fit into a number of new regulatory instruments of the law of obligations aimed at creating an attractive investment legal and economic environment in the Russian Federation.

The paper is devoted to the Russian Federation Constitutional Court understanding of the permissible limits of individual autonomy and boundaries of its limitation for the common good.

Constitutional axiology as a form of direct relation to the model and practice of actual constitutionalism functions as the basis for the formation of a social policy. In Russia, economic cataclysms reveal problems in the system of pensions, taxation, employment and education. We are witnessing a certain deformation of the legal consciousness of the population. Such turning points inevitably raise questions about the best balance between the interests of the individual, society and the state.

The threat of imbalance between public and private interests stimulates the highest judicial authorities to interfere in the formation of the hierarchy of constitutional and legal values. Increasingly, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation deals with issues of the common good, the need to take into account public interests in the resolution of tax, labor, civil and other types of disputes.

The paper is devoted to determining the citizen’s function to protect the Fatherland and ensure the defense and security of the Russian Federation. Based on the analysis of the legal nature of citizens’ participation in defense and security, as well as internal and external military threats and dangers, it is concluded that protection of the Fatherland is associated with ensuring the existence, functioning and legitimacy of the State, the functions and administrative and legal forms of such participation. The analysis of doctrinal views on the concept of the constitutional system and judicial practice gives grounds to infer that the legal institution under consideration is immanent to the constitutional system: by participating, citizens perform a legitimizing function in relation to the constitutional order and the state power, i.e. reproduce the State identity of Russia, which can be expressed both in an active and passive form. If participation involves incorporation of the State into a military organization, citizens perform a shaping function. Since such participation presupposes the existence of rights and obligations, which follows from the constitutional norms on the duty and duty to protect the Fatherland, citizens, entering into legal relations, exercise human rights protective (protecting their interests) and law enforcement (protecting public interests) functions. Participation of citizens in ensuring defense and security and acting as a form of democracy involves not only the performance of duty and responsibility to protect the Fatherland, but also implementation of the rights and freedoms of citizens and their associations, other organizations in the interests of protecting the constitutional system, ensuring the defense and security of the State. The functions allow us to classify the forms of participation depending on the functional nature, the nature of the implementation of legal rights in state administration, the nature of relations with state bodies, the degree of relevance to the result, the type of administrative and legal status, the basis of participation.

The use of methodological approaches of F. Brodel makes it possible to distinguish temporal levels in criminal law: finite and rapid changing. In the case of a crime, there are a number of crimes that have changed very slowly throughout history. The number of prohibited acts varied depending on the priorities of protection, leaving unchanged the protection of human life and health (murder, causing serious harm to health), state power (assault on the life of the sovereign and the foundations of public administration) and property (theft, robbery, robbery). Another temporal level of crime is rapid changing, which is determined by opportunistic (primarily political) considerations and undergoes significant changes at certain stages of development of society and the state. The content of this level can be filled through the criminalization and decriminalization of acts counteracting which is relevant in a relatively short period of time. Among all the available punishments, history also allows us to determine similar temporal levels. The death penalty, imprisonment and a fine can be referred to the finite one. All others (correctional labor, forced labor, exile, corporal punishment, deprivation of the right to occupy certain positions, etc.) are opportunistic or belong to the rapid changing temporal level. Methodologically, this division of the criminal law and its fundamental categories makes it possible not only to organize comparative legal research, develop rules of criminal law policy on criminalization and decriminalization, penalization and depenalization of acts, but also to predict the further development of criminal law, criminal law and criminal law doctrine.

The article raises a question about the autonomy of criminal law. Various aspects of the doctrinal understanding of the limits of criminal law and its scope in relation to the positive branches of legislation are considered. The author in the context of the existence of the concept of autonomy (independence) of criminal law regulation questions the limits of judicial interpretation. In this context, antagonistic views on the limits of the mechanism of criminal law regulation are considered. Particular attention is given to the fundamental premise that the functional autonomy of criminal law generates not only a protective component, but also a regulatory function, and the law enforcement officer has the right to decide a particular case, based on concepts borrowed from other branches of law, but it can give them a different meaning and significance than the one they are endowed with in these positive (regulating specific social relations) sectors. The author comes to the conclusion that an autonomous interpretation of foreign industry features and concepts of regulatory legislation is scarcely credible. If a criminal law is to protect economic relations arising from the static and dynamic nature of objects of civil rights and their turnover from criminal encroachments, its subordination to the provisions of regulatory legislation is inevitable. The determinism here should be manifested precisely in accordance with the description of the signs of the crime to the provisions of regulatory norms. As a result, the autonomy of criminal law may create uncertainty about the content of the rule of law itself and allow for unlimited discretion in its enforcement. In this formulation of the issue, the autonomy of criminal law regulation is replaced by a very different approach — the autonomy of the judicial interpretation of criminal law. However, in this case there is a substitution of concepts, and the autonomy of criminal law is associated not so much with the regulatory function as with the law enforcement of criminal law.

Based on the study of court decisions, the article analyzes the first judicial-investigative practice of applying innovations in the system of procedural coercive measures — preventive measures in the form of a ban on certain actions, as well as bail and house arrest in combination with the prohibitions provided for in part 6 of article 105.1 of the Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation. The subject of the study were 40 court decisions made by district and higher courts of 17 constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The author analyzes these decisions on preventive measures, the initiators of their election, the crimes charged with the accused, the stages of criminal proceedings at which they were taken. Decisions on the election of a ban on certain actions are analyzed according to the criteria: the number of simultaneous prohibitions; the time allowed to leave the premises; the places that the accused is forbidden to visit; the persons with whom they are forbidden to communicate. The analysis of the resolutions on the election of bail and house arrest with simultaneous establishment of certain prohibitions showed that the courts do not always properly motivate their decisions, subjected to defendants not covered by section 6 of article 105.1 of the Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation prohibitions, permitted the defendants to take actions that do not provide their isolation from society. The data given in the article are accompanied by the author’s comments and references to the decisions set in the State automated system of the Russian Federation “Justice”. At the end of the study, the author provides conclusions and proposes to adjust in the near future the judicial practice of application of preventive measures following appropriate explanations of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, taking into account the changes made to the Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation by the Federal law of 18.04.2018 No. 72-FZ.

The paper raises the question of the possibility of applying the territorial principle of sovereignty and jurisdiction of the State in relation to cyberspace, as well as the possible rethinking and expansion of the concept of “territory of the State” through the inclusion of virtual spatial units that do not have the properties of geographical extent. The inclusion of cyberspace in the concept of “territory of the State” is conditioned by the fact that cyberspace as a sphere of realization of social, economic and political relations cannot be beyond the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the State. If, however, the supremacy of a state is established in relation to a spatial unit, that unit must be referred to the concept of “territory of the State”, the legal meaning of which is to designate the spatial sphere of competence of the State. The question of the possible inclusion of cyberspace in the concept of “territory” is further justified by the lack of static content of this concept, which at certain stages of historical development as a result of political, geographical, technological and other factors began to cover new spatial boundaries (air, space, continental shelf space, etc.). At the same time, with the development of cyberspace, not the concept of “territory of the State” itself evolves, the legal significance of which lies in the spatial limits of the full jurisdiction of the State, but only the content components of the territory through the inclusion of new spatial units that do not have a tangible, planar aspect. The author analyzes the normative approaches of Russia and the United States to the issues of outlining the spatial contour of the jurisdiction of States in cyberspace, as a result of which it is revealed that the initiatives of Russian law are more limited to the dominance of the technological approach, which consists in establishing territorial boundaries with respect to physically located on the territory of the State devices and equipment with which access to information is carried out. In contrast to the American approach, which legislates the establishment of jurisdiction over data on servers in foreign countries, the Russian law does not raise the question of the possibility of including in the spatial limit of jurisdiction of information resources oriented to the territory of Russia, access to which is supported by equipment located outside the territory of Russia.

This paper is the first in Russia comprehensive theoretical and practical study of one of the world’s largest international scientific installations of the “megasience” class — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — from the standpoint of legal science.

The author focuses on the unique legal status and legal nature of international scientific collaborations, with the help of which scientists from dozens of countries, including Russia, carry out research and make scientific discoveries on the LHC. The paper considers and analyzed the following: the history of development, general principles of the LHC and the European organization for nuclear research (CERN), under the auspices of which its construction was carried out; the principles of the structure and functioning of international scientific collaborations around the LHC; the legal nature of their constituent documents as acts of soft law; the ratio of soft and hard law mechanisms in the regulation of international scientific collaborations around the LHC.

The final section presents data and proposals on the use of the legal mechanisms studied in other countries and international organizations, including for the purpose of the construction of scientific installations of the “megasience” class under the auspices of the national scientific organizations of Russia and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna (Moscow region).

The paper analyzes the legislative acts on the collection and storage of biometric data of citizens and the changes in the idea of how the legal state can and should be arranged, what the guarantees of the security of providing such data to various structures in the Russian and German legislation are. The idea of a rule-of-law state was, as you know, was developed in Germany by C. T. Welker, R. v. Mohl, R.G. Gneist and J.C. Freiherr von Aretin and was borrowed by Russian statesmen — S. S. Alekseev, V. M. Gessen, N.M. Korkunov, A. F. Kistyakovsky, S.A. Kotlyarevsky, P.I. Novgorodtsev, N.I. Paliyenko. During the existence of our States, this concept has undergone many changes in both its Russian and German versions, which each time was dictated by a number of objective reasons. At the present stage, both powers are concerned with the problem of security, the threat of terrorism, fraud in the Internet space. Therefore, in the European Union, for example, the requirement for identification documents to contain biometric data is now mandatory for all member countries. European thought, as revealed in the analysis of existing concepts and experience of their implementation, was a few steps ahead — while in Russia laws are adopted without discussion with citizens infringing their rights guaranteed by the Constitution, Europe is concerned with the creation of a data storage system representing the cultural heritage of mankind. The rule of law state has become to a large extent a metaphor for which a particular citizen does not feel any content. The use of this term has become a technological tool for the state to achieve political and geopolitical goals, a way to prove that we are also among the civilized liberal democracies and market economies, which distorts the essence of the idea of the rule of law for a particular person. The Russians themselves often do not understand the idea of the rule of law and the mechanism for its achievement.

The Russian state has historically used the reference not only as an implementation of criminal punishment against convicts, but also to solve colonization, economic, cultural and social problems on the Eastern borders of the country. The vast and undeveloped territory in the East of the country; natural minerals, raw materials for the emerging Russian industry; the presence of the land route of the TRANS-Siberian direction, all this at first looked very attractive. However, at the end of the second half of the 19th century the authorities were forced to reform the Siberian exile, and in the future to completely abandon it, recognizing it is extremely inefficient and costly for the state. Modern geopolitical interests of Russia face similar problems typical for the State in earlier historical periods. As for the exile or some other punishment associated with the voluntary or forced displacement of a large number of people from one region to another (more often from the Central regions to the outskirts of the country), will be resolved gradually, depending primarily on the socio-economic capabilities of the state.