Articles

The article reviews the new edition of the textbook “Prosecutor’s Supervision”, prepared by the leading researcher in this field of law, Professor V.B. Yastrebov, Doctor of Law, and Candidate of Law V.V. Yastrebov. The article provides a positive assessment of the authors’ approach to presenting the course, which is based on both a qualitative historical analysis of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office and modern approaches to the theory of prosecutor’s supervision as a field of scientific knowledge. At a high doctrinal level, the authors cover the legal basis of the organization of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation, provide a definition and characteristics of its functions, and pay attention to the issues of further development of the Prosecutor’s Office, taking into account the concept proposed by them. Of particular interest is the actual rejection of the traditional approach to studying the activities of the Prosecutor’s Office through the lens of the branches of prosecutorial supervision. The authors offer a deep study of the concepts of “function” and “main area of activity” of the Prosecutor’s Office, which is of educational and scientific interest. It seems that the new edition of the textbook, which differs from previous editions in its more detailed and comprehensive coverage of the fundamentals of the organization and activities of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation, can provide a high-quality study of prosecutorial supervision as a multifaceted area of activity of this important state body, as well as the corresponding academic discipline, by students of the Law Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University and other law schools and faculties in our country.

This article is focused on the problem of technological and educational determinant in ensuring systematic legal regulation of informational (digital) technology use. The research is conducted through the prism of state legal regulation stage. In the framework of this work the approaches to technological development and its legal control are being analysed, special attention is paid to digital technological development. The social aspect of digital and technological development is characterised as a factor of its systemic legal regulation, considering the secondary nature of systemic law in regards to level approach to social systems. In this research the authors accentuate the role of educational determinant of implementation of informational technology's systemic legal regulation and functional purpose in training the professionals, who can organise and improve this legal regulation and work in the conditions of development of legal system in the context of informational (digital) technology integration. This article describes the logic of cognition of educational determinant of ensuring systemic legal control and the use of informational (digital) technologies, it also touches upon the state of professional educational institutions in particular the implementation of informational (digital) technologies legal supervision in the case of specific law universities.

The task of overcoming the imbalance that arose as a result of the violation by one participant of civil law relations of the subjective rights of another person is designed to solve the institute of compensation for damages, which has gone through many stages of development before its final formalization into the current legal structure, which in this article is proposed to analyze as the example of French legal doctrine. Civil law institutions do not always work like a shagreen skin and not all the participants in civil turnover can get the desired result when activating the procedure for compensation for damage caused by the actions of the violator, therefore, the discussion about choosing the optimal form of compensation for harm remains relevant today. This brief review, conducted through a comparison of the expediency of choosing between monetary compensation or fulfillment of an obligation to compensate for harm in kind, allows you to feel, very well not only the semantics of the institute of compensation for damages, but also to see the main trends in the development of the theory of civil liability in France. Due to the fact that the adoption by the legislator, judicial practice and later by the doctrine of the decision on the choice of performance in kind or pecuniary indemnity as a priority in compensation for harm is of a fluctuating nature and is associated with socio-economic circumstances in a specific historical period, and, therefore, cannot have the features of a long-term practice.

The problem of legal technique in Russian legislation on political parties is a current direction in the constitutional and legal doctrine. One of the means of legal technique in party law is presumptions. They are based on the legal recognition of a certain fact without the need to establish it by law enforcement instruments. The ambiguous understanding of presumptions at the theoretical level predetermined the complexity of their perception among legal scholars specializing in party legal relations. Thus, they are mixed with related legal structures (legal values, principles and guarantees). This problem is complicated by the uneven development of the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, as well as the imbalance in judicial practice, in which it is necessary to interpret party-legal collisions on the basis of a certain legal regime. Therefore, presumptions in the institution of political parties are usually divided into universal (constitutional-legal and civil-legal), special (administrative-legal) and specific (party-legal) according to the criterion of the relationship of norms in the branches of law. The main methodological technique was structural analysis, because it ensured the identification of normative elements in the current party legislation. The systemic method helped to correlate party-legal norms with norms from related legal institutions, which used similar legal techniques. As a result of the analysis of party legislation, similarities and differences between party-legal presumptions and presumptive elements ensuring the procedure for implementing the law were revealed.

The article is aimed at the scientific understanding of the legal nature of compulsory educational measures in the structure of special types of exemption of minors from criminal liability and punishment. Based on the analysis of the legal connection between the act of exemption from criminal liability, the act of exemption from punishment and compulsory educational measures, the shortcomings of the legal regulation of the application of these measures have been identified, as well as their heterogeneous legal nature. It is argued that exemption from criminal liability marks the end of criminal law relations and excludes the application of any criminal law measures to a person. However, a minor is subjected to compulsory educational measures after being exempted from criminal liability. Hence, it is concluded that this type of exemption is unconditional, and the educational measures prescribed in this case are conducted within non-criminal relations. Such an approach is not consistent with the provision of Part 4 of art. 90 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation that creates a misleading perception that the type of exemption in question is conditional. The recommendations aimed at eliminating the identified shortcomings and giving priority to special types of exemption of minors from criminal liability and punishment with the use of educational measures have been made. It is stated that compulsory educational measures imposed as an alternative to a punishment are criminal law in nature since they are used within one of the forms of realization of criminal liability. The necessity of differentiation of educational measures applied when releasing minors from criminal liability and when releasing them from punishment is substantiated.

The metaverse is an integration of advanced technologies such as cloud computing, big data, blockchain, and augmented reality (XR) to create interconnections between the physical and virtual worlds. This system provides the effect of a network application in the context of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and their extensions beyond traditional models. In recent years, the global metaverse industry has made significant progress thanks to the rapid development of digital twin technologies, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality (XR). This has not only transformed the network structure that developed in the Internet age, but has also created new challenges in the field of cybersecurity and legal regulation. Obscene behavior in the metaverse can cause serious psychological damage to users, which manifests itself in the real world. Therefore, it is necessary to develop appropriate mechanisms for the criminal protection of victims in this area. Special attention should be paid to the problem of indecent acts against minors in the space of the metaverse. Such crimes can take various forms, including “remote and virtual contact,” “virtual sexual exposure,” “obscenity with virtual violence,” and “perfecting deception skills.” In modern China, the criminal law regulation of these socially dangerous acts should be based on the principle of the most favored minors through appropriate judicial interpretation in accordance with the current Criminal Code of the People’s Republic of China.

This article is devoted to the scientific views of I.M. Tyazhkova, Professor of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology of the Law Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University, on the object and system of crimes against justice. The author comes to the conclusion that I.M. Tyazhkova's views on the content of the object of crimes against justice are based on the classical concept of the plenitude of judicial power developed within the framework of pre-revolutionary legal science. According to this concept, any procedural activity aimed at creating conditions for the consideration and resolution of a case on the merits by a court is covered by the concept of "legal proceedings", including in cases where this activity is carried out by officials who are not institutionally related to the judiciary. Due to this approach, it is necessary to include in the system of crimes against justice acts that infringe on the correct activities of the bodies of inquiry, preliminary investigation and the prosecutor's office, since these bodies, carrying out procedural activities within the framework of legal proceedings, create conditions for the administration of justice, therefore crimes directed against the interests of the relevant bodies, at the same time always infringe on the interests of justice. The concept of the plenitude of judicial power also helps to correctly distinguish between crimes against justice and crimes against the order of government.

The scientific works of the famous Russian lawyer Sergey Viktorovich Poznyshev in the sphere of criminal psychology are of great importance. He had identified endogenous and exogenous criminal personality types. The typology had based on the concept of the mental constitution of the person. Also, he had identified some various types of endogenous criminals. Predisposition to crime is an important characteristic of endogenous criminals. It is expressed in a person’s tendency to resort to a crime or a crime-like method (fraudulent, violent, abusive) to achieve their goal. The main target complexes were used as the basis for identifying such types of criminals as impulsive, emotional, rational, reasoners and ideological. Target complexes consist of the combination of predispositions to certain goals together with predispositions to certain ways of achieving its. The article demonstrates the more recent approaches of Soviet criminologists, and as well as modern works devoted to the study of the mental type of a person. The study of the criminal’s personality and the identification of mental personality types are of great importance for criminal sciences. The article discusses the significance of the typology of criminal types of criminals for criminal law as penalization and individualization of punishment; for criminology as of finding determinants of criminal behavior, forecasting and prevention, as well as penal enforcement law as correction and re-socialization of convicts.

The article addresses the problem of unlawfulness in relation to crimes provided for in criminal law provisions containing so-called blanket elements, as well as in provisions establishing liability for violations of special rules. The paper analyzes the main approaches developed in criminal law theory to the unlawfulness of such provisions — “protective” and “regulatory” approaches. Particular attention is paid to the problem of applying provisions with a “blanket” disposition in cases where blanket legislation (that is, non-criminal legislation positively regulating social relations) is used to give an expansive interpretation to a criminal law provision. In some cases, these results in the application of a criminal law provision to relations that are closely related to, but nevertheless not covered by, the specific criminal law provision, thereby amounting to analogy, which is expressly prohibited by law. It is suggested that where such regulatory rules consist of safety requirements common to various types of economic or other activity, the application of safety standards from one sphere to another does not in itself constitute analogy in criminal law. The article confirms the conclusion that where the legislator has expressly limited, in a regulatory rule, the possibility of its application to other types of relations, the authority applying the law may not apply it to such relations in the course of the legal classification of an offence. However, where regulatory law contains different rules, some allowing their application to the relations under consideration and others excluding it, the authority applying the law is not obliged, when legally classifying an offence, to choose the norm that prohibits such application.

In today’s world, it’s crucial not only to focus criminological research on urban issues, but also to develop an independent field within criminology. The author proposes calling it criminological urbanology. This field could focus on the determination of crime in urban settings, as well as criminological prevention processes. The emergence of a broader field, legal urbanology, may serve as a basis for this conclusion. The historical premise for the emergence of criminological urbanology should be considered the comprehensive study of territorial differences in crime conducted in the Soviet Union and abroad. Prominent scholars from the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Moscow University — Professors M.N. Gernet, A.N. Trainin, A.A. Gertsenzon, and N.F. Kuznetsova — made significant scientific contributions to this field. The paper presents a brief overview of their scientific contributions to the study of urban crime, using Moscow as an example. The studies of Moscow crime in 1923 and 1968–69 played a particularly important role, addressing not only scientific but also educational objectives. The involvement of students from the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Law of Moscow University facilitated the students’ acquisition of independent research skills, a sense of the connection between research and practice, and a more detailed understanding of the subject. The mission of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Lomonosov Moscow State University is to continue the scientific tradition at the present stage.