Anastasia V. Maleshina

The article deals with the key issues of comparative criminal law — the definition of it as an independent branch of scientific knowledge and an academic discipline, the designation of methodological problems in conducting research in the field of criminal law, its stages, criteria for the typology of criminal law families in the modern period. The article analyzes the main scientific approaches to substantiating the scientometric status of comparative criminal law and the process of its institutionalization, formulates the object and subject, and other theoretical foundations of comparative criminal law. Special attention is paid to the comparative method as the leading one in comparative law. Based on the paradigm of relativity, conditionality and multidimensionality of the scientific approach, the basic methodological rules of comparison and its stages are identified and justified, the observance of which allows us to formulate critically significant and reasonable conclusions as a result of comparative analysis. The article concludes that it is necessary to take into account the legal tradition as a relevant criterion for classifying criminal law systems as a set of views rooted in people's minds on the nature of law and political ideology, historical attitudes to the role of law in society, to the organization and functioning of the legal system as a whole.