In Ukrainian jurisprudence, the issue of the formation and development of law doctrine has been brought up recently, an issue that constantly remains in the field of attention of the world legal community.

The purpose of the proposed article is to provide the author’s interpretation of the general concept of law doctrine and demonstrate the role of law understanding as a conceptual and methodological foundation for the formation and development of the latter.

In view of the multiplicity of legal phenomena “lawfulness” and “legality” can hardly be considered as their single-meaning characteristics. The property of “legality” can be associated only with those social phenomena that are the result of the state’s manifestationof will, the power-regulatory activity of state bodies. From such positions, only such doctrine, which is directly pronounced, supported, and used by governmental bodies in their legal and regulatory practice, will be considered legal. The basis of the given interpretation of legal doctrine is the understanding of law as established or sanctioned by the state, while among other types of law understandings, in particular, “natural” or sociological, state-regulatory activity is most often not mentioned at all.

It seems reasonable to consider a law doctrine as a complete, logically agreed, dynamic system of worldview-conceptual views of a general, instructive-directive nature regarding such human life activity, the concept of which is denoted by the term “lawful”. Given the well-known historical pluralism of law understanding, the pluralism of law doctrines is and, obviously, will be insurmountable in the future.

The conceptual distinction between law and legal doctrines in itself does not disprove the fact that both of the just mentioned types of doctrines can have their own socionecessary and conceptual sources of plurality, one way or another. Instead, the conceptual basis for a monistic, unified interpretation of the concept of legal doctrine today, as before, is only a state-centric approach to the understanding of law.

Bibliography

Authored books

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Edited books

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Journal articles

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