Crime and corpus delicti as social and legal phenomena and concepts from the perspective of dialectic of general, specific and individual in law

Volume 5, Number 4, 2020, P. 432–450

[ JURIDICAL SCIENCES ]

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Abstract:

Raising an issue of manifestations of the categories of dialectics in criminal law is not typical for Russian criminal law science. Several works highlight some issues — objective and subjective in a crime, time and terms in criminal law; the cause and effect are considered more particularly. The categories of the general, specific and individual appear to be obvious and axiomatic. When studying legal phenomena researchers leave aside the analysis of the specifics of the manifestations of these categories in legal matter. The specificity of these categories is in a special relationship with law as a phenomenon of constructed reality. A person creates law, uses a system of concepts and rules for their use in legal texts. In this regard, the subject of lawmaking must take into account the objectively existing patterns of functioning of the conceptual sphere. A crime is not only a real social phenomenon, but also its legal characteristics, several levels of the legislative concept about it. At these levels, the categories of general, specific and individual determine the relationship between the concepts of crime. Moreover, a crime is a type of phenomena of a different level, legally isolated on the basis of social characteristics — offenses, legal facts. The features of the concepts of these phenomena as a general one are manifested in the understanding of crime. The corpus delicti as a concept functions in legal science according to the same patterns. Although we deal with fairly obvious things, some discussions in the science of criminal law in Russia raise the question of compliance of patterns of the general, specific and individual in defining the concepts of criminal law phenomena. The article opens the questions about these patterns; the author attempts to answer these questions taking into account the existing theoretical concepts.

Keywords:

dialectics of criminal law, categories of dialectics, corpus delicti, crime, systematic law, offense

Author:

Egor A. Kulikov, Cand. Sci. (Juridical Sciences), Associate Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology Department, Altai State University, Barnaul, Russia

Acknowledgments:

The manuscript was prepared with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, research project No. 20-011-00121 «Theory of the general, specific and individual in the criminal law of Russia: methodological, technical, legal and applied aspects».

For citation:

Kulikov E.A. ( 2020) Crime and corpus delicti as social and legal phenomena and concepts from the perspective of dialectic of general, specific and individual in law. Sotsial’naya kompetentnost’ = Social Competence. Vol. 5. No. 4. P. 432–450. (In Russ.)

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