The paper is devoted to the doctrinal meaning and practical significance of the presumption of the creative nature (originality) of copyright objects. This presumption is not directly enshrined in Russian law, but it follows from the systemic interpretation of the rules dedicated to notion of the author. A citizen who created a work by his creative work is recognized as the author. The laws of many countries contain the presumption of originality of works, but its interpretations are diametrically different. At the present time, in the conditions of an increasingly accelerating and complicating civil turnover accompanied by the information revolution, legal and technical substantive approaches to the category of originality (as a synonym for creativity) as a common and only prerequisite for the protection of works by copyright and the continental copyright system have gradually begun to converge. At the same time, domestic judicial practice still unreasonably ignores the doctrine of substantial similarity of works based on the presumption of originality. The author proposes an authentic classification of disputes concerning the originality of works, the basis of which is the number of objects involved in the dispute.

The author builds a coordinate system, the criterion of which is the degree of change of the original work: identical copying — non-identical copying — processing — free creation of another original work. At the same time, the author emphasizes that a copy, even significantly different from the original, does not cease to be a copy. In legal terms, identical and non-identical copying constitutes reproduction that requires the consent of the author or copyright holder of the original work. A necessary sign of processing is the purpose of the author of the changes to expand the possibilities of using the original work; processing also requires the consent of the author or copyright holder with respect to the original work. Non-identical copying and reworking should be distinguished from creating a new work using an unprotected content of the original authentic work.

The paper examines the sociolegal and economic significance of legislative measures taken to support families with children and granting the possibility of using maternal (family) fund for the acquisition, construction or reconstruction of residential premises. It analyzes numerous issues related to the acquisition, registration, exercise and protection of joint tenancy (the right to common share ownership of residential premises) acquired in this way, including: the procedure for determining the share in the ownership of residential premises acquired in this manner. The paper also examines factors on which the size of the share of each of the family members depends and parties to the agreements concluded regarding such a distribution. Much attention is also paid to the issues of whether it is mandatory, when determining the size of a share in the ownership of a dwelling, to take into account the opinion of a child who has reached the age of 10, and the competition between the rights and interests of parents and children in respect of dwellings belonging to them on the basis of a joint tenancy (common share property). On the basis of the analysis of the Soviet and Russian civil and housing legislation in order to prevent the violation of the rights of parents to such property by adult children living with them, the author makes a proposal to legally restrict the administrative powers belonging to children.

The author summarizes that the presence of an indissoluble consanguinity in the form of the origin of children from parents and the efforts of parents to take care of the child’s health, to meet the child’s needs, to provide conditions for the child’s full development and education necessitate a special legal consolidation of the rights to living premises belonging to children and parents on the ground of the right to joint tenancy (common shared ownership). The inclusion into Art. 246 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation of provisions restricting the administrative powers of adult children will constitute another step towards the humanization of Russian civil legislation.

The paper highlights the problem of the growth of the segment of precarious employment in the work of researchers and the faculty, who work mainly in scientific and educational institutions (scientific and pedagogical workers). Besides the elements of precarious employment characteristic of the category of workers under consideration, the author considers the fixed-term nature of labor relations and the low level of the conditionally constant part of wages in the general structure of wages of scientific and pedagogical workers, which can be attributed to the legal prerequisites for the deterioration (precarization) of their labour regulation. In addition to the acts of federal legislation regulating the labor of scientific and pedagogical workers, the author analyzes the provisions of the relevant acts of social partnership for the period from 2015 untill 2023. The author highlights the problem of increasing the types of work included by the employer in the employment of the “second half of the day” of scientific and pedagogical workers without paying additional wages. The lack of legal regulation of the distribution of types of work performed by a scientific and pedagogical worker within a 36-hour working week is also noted by the author among the legal preconditions that, with appropriate law enforcement, worsen the conditions of employment of such workers due to the significantly increasing proportion of time that workers spend on achieving performance indicators and efficiency determined by the employer. In the conclusion of the paper, the author justifies amendments to the legislation in terms of regulating a fixed-term employment contract, establishing the share of guaranteed wages in the overall structure of wages, regulating the types of work included in the working hours of scientific and pedagogical workers at the level of a by-law, which cumulatively will promote sustainability of employment conditions for employees and improve their legal status.

The purpose of the study is to identify contradictions between the competence of a public official of a government body based on the post he takes, on the one hand, and the need for this official to make managerial decisions beyond his competence. On the basis of this contradiction, the authors show the negative consequences of the implementation of management activities by a public official and suggest some measures to prevent and eliminate them.

The paper analyzes the cases when the heads of public authorities were supposed to accept construction and repair work performed by counterparties under civil contracts, but due to their incompetence in this matter, they signed acts of acceptance of the work performed without indicating any shortcomings, for which they were brought to criminal and financial liability. The authors describe the reasons for these negative phenomena, analyze the possibility and legitimacy of the delegation by the heads of public authorities of powers to accept the work performed and determine the subject matter of the offense.

By analyzing the judicial practice, the authors determine the subjects of crimes in the field of poor-quality reception of work performed by contractors; attention is focused on the fact that in order to qualify such acts as criminal, it is not necessary to establish the intent. Officials’ references to their incompetence in this matter, as a rule, are ignored by the courts. By comparing the activities of leaders in the commercial and public spheres, the authors point to the possibility of criminal prosecution of a public official without claiming damage caused to any person and before considering a legal dispute for compensation for damage between the public authority and the counterparty. In conclusion, the authors make proposals on the need to involve third-party organizations in the acceptance of the work performed on the basis of outsourcing, which will increase the quality of activities of public authorities and reduce the level of malfeasance.

The author examines the problem of the special knowledge functioning in criminal proceedings. By synchronizing the institutions of the criminal procedure that regulate the legal relationship between the knowledgeable persons and the institution of criminal law regulating the responsibility of these participants in the commission of a crime against justice, the author demonstartes asymmetry between the rights and duties of a specialist. The subject of the study is constituted by the contradictions between the institutions of procedural and substantive law, namely, the discrepancy between the procedural complex (rights, duties, functions) of a specialist to the course of his criminal responsibility. For this purpose, a comparison is made between the rights and obligations of knowledgeable persons, based on the criteria of: a) the scope of procedural functions; b) the specificity of procedural rights and obligations; c) actual forms of special knowledge acceptable as evidence. On the basis of the revealed contradictions, the situation of competitiveness of special knowledge is investigated; the legal significance of the forms of special knowledge is determined. The author proposes a systematic solution, namely: 1) to clarify the procedural status of a specialist: to add the definition of “forensic specialist” to Art. 58, 61, 71, 74, 80, part 4 of Art. 164, art. 168, 251, 270, 271 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation; 2) to clarify the epistemological aspects of the research functions of a specialist in accordance with Part 3.1 of Art. 74, art. 80; Part 1.2 of Art. 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation; 3) to establish a mechanism for the responsibility of a specialist for giving a deliberately false opinion: to add to Art. 58 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, part 5 by analogy with part 5 of Art. 57 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation; to supplement the text of Part 1 of Art. 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation; to correct the content of Art. 307 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Or release the specialist from criminal liability for the opinion expressed by him (even if it is deliberately false). The author proves that the proposed measures will promote adversarial evidence, increase the specialist’s subjective responsibility for the conclusion given by him, which corresponds to the institution of proving.

The main research methods are: general scientific methods, review and analysis of legislative sources, contextual method, semantic analysis and formal logical analysis.

The study is focused on the development of the theory of a criminal misconduct as an independent type of a criminal offense. The aim of the work was to formulate the author’s definition of a criminal misconduct that meets the social demand for the liberalization of the branch of criminal legislation. In the course of the research, the dialectical method was used, which made it possible to discover and analyze the common nature and, at the same time, the independence of a criminal offence and a criminal misconduct A universal tool of cognition was combined with such specific scientific methods as systemic and formal-logical methods. The theses developed in the work are based on the analysis of the content of criminal legislation, as well as the corresponding standins of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and representatives of the criminal law doctrine.

The author gives examples from judicial practice as illustrations of legally significant situations that receive an ambiguous criminal-legal assessment at the level of law enforcement.

Based on the results of the study, the concept of a criminal offense was formulated and the mechanism of its establishment was revealed. A criminal misconduct is justified as an act, although it contains signs of any corpus delicti, formally belonging to the category of small or medium severity, but recognized by the court, due to its insignificance, as not posing a public danger. The mechanism for establishing a criminal misconduct presupposes a statement in the act of the category of public danger (formal signs of corpus delicti) and further exclusion of the degree of public danger and, as a consequence, public danger in general. The ideas presented in the work can serve as a motive and basis for rethinking issues related to the substantiation of the nature of a criminal misconduct and its delimitation from other legal torts.

Modern Russia shows an increasing interest in religion not just as an individual psychological phenomenon, but as a social institution that occupies a prominent place and actively participates in the life of the state and society. Against the background of the spiritual revival of the country, anticlerical trends appear, speculating on the constitutional principle of secularism and seeing its violation in almost any contacts of the state with religious associations. The main thesis of the paper is that the secular model of the state does not accept the interference of religious associations and authorities in each other’s affairs, but at the same time assumes their interaction, which should be outlined by the legislative framework.

The author examines the semantics of the term “clericalization” and concludes that it means not just the rapprochement of the state with the most influential confessions in society, but also the process of promoting the church’s interests with the help of state power. Based on an analysis of the current legislation, the historical experience of Russia’s development, the current state of state-confessional relations, it is concluded that it is premature to talk about clericalization in our country. This is supported by the existence of strict legal prohibitions and restrictions on the direct participation of religious associations and their representatives in politics, as well as the formal distancing of the church and the state from each other in solving political issues. The state and church interaction in the field of education is quite clearly regulated. However, in other areas of public life, the boundaries of such interaction are conditional, so the author believes that certain prerequisites are emerging for the development of clerical tendencies. Legal, historical and ideological prerequisites are highlighted. The author proposes to improve the legal regulation of some problematic aspects of state-confessional relations.

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.

In 1964, the trial of Werner Schoenemann, the commander of one of the 6 punitive units of the Einsatzkommando 8, took place in Cologne. The criminal was charged with mass executions of Jews on the territory of Belarus in late June — September 1941. The paper shows how the former Nazi tried to avoid criminal responsibility and what legal assessment by the German justice his atrocities received. V. Schoeneman denied his guilt and sought to shift responsibility for what he had done to the Wehrmacht troops. The defendant argued that the actions of extermination of Jews were carried out on the initiative of the German armed forces and were in the nature of reprisals; they were designed to force the local population to abandon the conduct of guerrilla warfare. Based on the testimony of the accused, law enforcement officers detained three officers of the 354th Infantry Regiment involved in the liquidation of the Jewish community of the town of Krupki (September 18, 1941). During the investigation, it was established that the service members provided support to members of the Einsatzkommando 8 during the execution, but were not the initiators of this atrocity. For complicity in the grave murders of 2,170 Jews in the settlements of Slonim, Borisov, Smolevichi, Krupki and others, V. Schoeneman was sentenced to 6 years in prison. When assigning such a lenient punishment, representatives of the German Themis relied on the dominant approach to assessing the criminal activities of former Nazis in the 1960s. According to the jury, the defendant was only a submissive executor of orders, an impersonal, devoid of his own motives “cog” in the mechanism of the Nazi state. V. Schoeneman did not repent of what he had done. For the former punisher, Jewish victims were still just dry figures in the reports, thanks to which he sought to make a career. Schoeneman’s case proves that Wehrmacht service members took an active part in the Holocaust along with members of the Einsatzkommandos. The genocide, unprecedented in the history of humankind, became possible only because of the broad participation of German citizens representing various social strata and professional groups.

In the historiography of political and legal doctrines, along with general scientific research methods, traditional methods are used: chronological, problematic, portrait, country studies. The critical approach is applied in all types of research of political ideas. Meanwhile, in historiography, this method is not given the attention it deserves. Criticism always involves an assessment of the empirical and theoretical material contained in various texts (sources). The productivity of this method is obvious. A critical approach makes it possible to assess the scientific content of a particular political doctrine, as well as the practical prospects for its implementation. Criticism implies a deep immersion of the researcher into the problem and maximum objectivity in evaluating the results obtained. This is what is most often lacking. The legal sphere is already political and is an integral part of it. Political doctrines, as well as the law (one of the forms of expression of law), are always connected with the interests of social groups (In the former terminology — classes). In this regard, it is not necessary to expect neutrality in the estimates. This was the case at the time of total administration in the field of social sciences, and it is happening today, when methodological pluralism and ideological diversity are declared. During the Soviet period, “bourgeois” doctrines and their creators were particularly criticized. As time has shown, this criticism was largely justified. History as such consistently confirms a curious pattern: “progressive” thinkers eventually become “reactionary”, as well as vice versa. Moreover, not only in our country. The paper states the dual orientation of criticism. On the one hand, a critical approach allows a more objective assessment of the political and legal doctrine. This shows its cognitive (cognitive) aspect. On the other hand, criticism gives the researcher a chance to convey to the reader the essence of any theory, doctrine, and idea and give him the opportunity to evaluate them himself. In the conditions of actual censorship, criticism remains almost the only genre of characterization of political and legal doctrines.

The active development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology poses the question of how to integrate this phenomenon into legal reality, about the limits of using this technology in social practices regulated by law, and ultimately about developing an optimal model of legal regulation of AI. The paper focuses on the problem of developing the legal content of the concept of AI, including some methodological and ontological foundations of such work. The author brings to the scientific discussion certain constant characteristics of AI that are significant for legal regulation, which, if adopted by the legal scientific community, could be used as a scientifically sound basis for constructing specific variants of legal regulation that meet the needs of a particular sphere of social practice. The author believes that the scientifically based legal concept of AI is largely able to determine the direction and scope of applied legal research on the multidimensional problems of using AI technology in social interaction practices, including in the administration of justice, to distinguish the legal issues and problems related to this from ethical, philosophical, technological and other issues.

According to the author, the task of forming the legal concept of AI is not limited to the formulation of specific legal definitions and cannot be solved at this level. The result of the juridification of the concept of AI should be a set of unchangeable (constant) legal characteristics, while specific definitions of this term in regulations may differ depending on the needs of legal regulation practice. In the work on the formation of a legally significant concept of AI, it is proposed to abandon the descriptive essentialist approach aimed at identifying the essence of AI in favor of an ascriptive constructivist approach, which involves attributing to the content of the concept of AI those legal properties that, on the one hand, are significant for the purposes of legal regulation, and on the other hand, limit the limits of legal regulation.

Globally the developed countries economies exist in conditions of ever-increasing competition. In recent decades, the states whose economy is based on modern technologies, the introduction of innovations and the creation of a favorable environment for their emergence has gained some advantage. Venture investment is an important component of the innovation economy, without which it is difficult to imagine the rapid development of new technologies. Under these conditions, the task of the legal systems of developed countries has become to create a legal framework for venture investment: convenient, transparent and understandable for national and international investors.

In Russia, an important stage in the creation of a legal infrastructure for investment was the adoption of the Federal Law “On Investment Partnership” in 2011, designed to provide the investment community with contractual organizational and legal forms of collective investment activity, taking into account the specifics of the implementation of venture (especially risky) business projects. The Russian investment partnership is a direct analogue of the American limited partnership (limited partnership).

The paper considers the main advantages of an investment partnership over other forms of collective investment activity, as well as analyzes some aspects of the regulation of investment partnerships in Russia and limited partnerships in the United States. The author concludes that an investment partnership is the optimal form of collective investment activity provided for by Russian legislation. There is no doubt that the general proximity of the construction of an investment partnership and a limited partnership, common in the United States (and other common law countries), makes an investment partnership the most attractive form of attracting foreign investment to the Russian market.