Moscow University Law Bulletin. 2021. 6.

The teleological approach, which is based on comparing the obtained result with the set goals, is often used to determine the effectiveness of legal regulation of environmental relations. The correct formulation of goals in environmental legislation and taking into account a number of relevant factors affecting formulation of the goals, can increase the accuracy of determining the effectiveness of environmental legal regulation. The aim of the study is to establish the key characteristics of the goals of legal regulation of environmental relations, which lead to a correct determination of the effectiveness of the regulation. The task of analyzing the goals enshrined in the legislation in the aspect of identifying their clarity and unambiguity is set. The problem of the increased role of economic interests in the legal regulation of some social relations that are closely connected to environmental ones was raised. Because of this, the state of the environment is excluded from the overall assessment of effectiveness. There are shown examples of laws that are actually ecologized due to the essence of regulated relations and due to the presence of norms of environmental law in them, but in which are not goals that have bound to the regulation of the impact of economic or other activities on the environment. Some of the new institutions of environmental law are assessed as ambiguous in terms of targeting. It is emphasized that the goals of regulating of environmental relations are based on the concept of a favorable environment. It is concluded that environmental interests, if any, should be reflected in the setting of legal goals. The conditionality of goals by the existence of environmental interests, the clarity and transparency of their formulations, in their part, entail the correctness and completeness of determining the effectiveness of environmental legal regulation.

Changes to regulations on dissenting opinions of judges of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation provoked a vivid discussion among the Russian legal professionals. It appears that arguments in this discussion are closely connected to approval or disapproval of constitutional judges’ dissenting opinions as such. The present paper attempts to discuss the legislative amendments regulating dissenting opinions of judges of the Constitutional Court from another perspective, namely through a comparative study of regulating of this sphere in dynamics, in Russia and abroad. For the aims of the study it is proposed to examine normative regulations on the right to dissenting opinion from “material” (right to dissenting opinion) and “procedural” (right to publish a dissenting opinion) aspects. The comparative analysis allowed identifying similarities and unique elements of the current legislation with that in foreign countries. Establishing requirements for contents of a judge’s dissenting opinion or to the form (style) of its expression can be regarded as relatively common. Yet, the situation where public expression of a dissenting opinion of a judge of a constitutional supervisory body is impossible while judges of general courts encounter no such limitation, is rather unique.

Modern constitutional-law scholarship, paying considerable attention to the methods of interpretation of the Russian Federation Constitution, often bypasses the substantive issues of interpretation of constitutional concepts, usually pushing them into the field of legal technique. A large number of studies focus on the issues of constitutional terminology, i. e. on the external aspect of constitutional concepts, leaving aside their meaning and place in the system of constitutional regulation. Meanwhile, the proper determination of the content and scope of a constitutional provision depends directly on the interpretation of the concept that forms the basis of the constitutional norm. For this purpose, the Russian Constitutional Court, which is authorized to interpret the Russian Federation Constitution in an official and binding way, applies the method of autonomous interpretation, which involves interpreting constitutional notions in the system of constitutional provisions without limiting to the definitions given to them by the statutory regulation. This method of interpretation has not been thoroughly understood in the domestic constitutional-law science in relation to the activities of the Russian Constitutional Court. However, under the conditions of the increasing complexity of the system of legislation, as well as in connection with the participation of the Russian Federation in international organizations, the autonomous interpretation of the Russian Federation Constitution may be in demand in the practice of the Russian Constitutional Court.

The key question of this article is whether legal claims and legal privileges (in Hohfeldian sense) are to be regarded as self-sufficient entities of their own, or they should be paired with other elements like legal powers. The basic thesis of the piece is that legal power is an indispensable element of a legal right of each and every type in private law. To demonstrate the viability of this basic thesis, the German concept of the so-called claim right (der Anspruch) in private law has been put under scrutiny. Various theoretical models of a claim right, as developed in the German private law doctrine, have been analysed (theories of B Windscheid, E. R. Bierling and A. Thon). All of them conceived claim right as inextricably connected with the legal power to dispose. Basically, the same is true of privileges (liberties in the Hohfeldian scheme of jural relationships), which, as the author thinks, cannot operate without legal powers.

The legal problems associated with Austria’s permanent neutrality are discussed in both Austrian and Russian international law literature controversially. Already the establishment of the Austrian neutrality in 1955 raises some legal questions. This article addresses — after an introduction to permanent neutrality as an institute of international law — the question of whether the Austrian neutrality is anchored in international law and, if so, on what legal basis that anchoring is based. By means of a comparative presentation of the Austrian and Soviet/Russian international law doctrine, an attempt is made to work out which of these various legal opinions appears justifiable from the view of the international law of neutrality. It will be shown that the obligations arising from Austria’s status of permanent neutrality go beyond those that are explicitly mentioned in the federal constitutional law on neutrality (Neutrality Act). Furthermore, it is presented that there are convincing reasons to argue for an anchoring of the Austrian neutrality in international treaty law in the Moscow Memorandum (April 1955) as well as in the State Treaty of Vienna (May 1955) and that the notification of the Neutrality Act provides another opportunity for a legal basis in international law. Furthermore, an attempt is made to show why the legal opinion which assumes that the Austrian neutrality is merely anchored in the Neutrality Act, and thus only on national law ground, has to be rejected.

The article examines the possibility of prosecution for the crime of aggression committed through cyber-attacks (cyberaggression) under international criminal law. The author analyzes the material elements of the crime, examines the most extensive cyberattacks in the last 15 years and concludes that such requirements of the art. 8bis as commitment of the act of aggression only by State and the threshold requirement for the act of aggression to reach the level of manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations, as well as the lack of indication on the opened or closed list of acts of aggression in art. 8bis, makes its application to cyberaggression difficult. The Rome Statute’s provisions on the subject of the crime of aggression which limit both primary perpetrators and accomplices to those who are in position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the action of a State, prevent cybercrime perpetrators from being held liable for the crime of aggression. Similar difficulties arise when applying the mental element requirements of the crime of aggression to possible cases of cyberaggression, such as intent and knowledge to commit crime of aggression. At the same time the author recognizes the possibility and even the need to extend the definition of aggression to cases of committing this crime through cyberattacks.

This research is the fourth in a series of articles devoted to the issues of genetic and legal education. In the first work, the author revealed the measure of freedom of the subject of law determining the mode of data use on the example of genetic information; in the second — the measure of freedom of the subject-addressee of genetic education in the context of its content; in the third — the features of the forms of genetic and legal education in the society of the Industry 4.0 era. The objective of the article is to analyze the work of genetic and legal education executors. The success and effectiveness genetic and legal education directly depends on its executors, who have to have the particular knowledge in respective field. And if this problem is being solved on school education level, then in regards to the remaining multimillion audience there’s still a lot of work that specialists have to do. As a result of this the objectives of this article are to study specific competences of genetic and legal education executors and study the form and means of this education. Authors focus on education factors which influence the competence model of subjects, performing genetic and legal education, composition. They also focus on the skill set and knowledge that the team of these educators should have, meaning special skills of genetic and law education executors are being analyzed. This article views the practical meaning of genetic and law education, its types and corresponding to it methods (official and unofficial education) are being analyzed. Authors conclude that it is necessary to conceptualize genetic legal education, and therefore provide relevant recommendations for science and practice pointing out the necessity to combine official and unofficial forms of education and work over the question of introduction of “genetic ombudsman”. In the course of this study, logical, comparative-legal and formal-legal methods were used.

The article reveals the main ideas and content of the current monographic research on the topic “Changing of Technological Orders and Legal Development of Russia” (Moscow, 2021), in which the author’s concept of legal genesis is presented on an interdisciplinary basis. This concept determines the legal genesis of the defining role of the dominant technology and technological structure of Russian society. Based on the position of the authors of the monograph, the specifics of the emergence, state and dynamics of the development of law, its regularities are largely determined by the technological factor at a particular historical period of time on the path of society’s movement from the traditional to the post-industrial type. Revealing from new methodological positions the fundamental natural connections of technological, economic and legal processes significant for the general theory and history of law at different historical stages, the authors build a certain logic of cyclical, wave development of the history of Russian law, due to the convergence of economic, technological and legal processes proper. An original interpretation of the periodization of the history of Russian law depending on technological structures is given, it is shown that in the evolution of domestic law, changes in its systemic and structural characteristics, a special place should be given to the role of the technological factor and the problem of dialectics of economic, technological and legal convergence.

Reviewed the monograph by E. A. Frolova “Rational Foundations of Law: Classics and Modernity”. The reviewers come to the conclusion about the relevance of this book and its significance for the development of theoretical-legal and philosophical-legal thought in Russia and note that E. A. Frolova objectively investigated the essence of law from a theoretical standpoint. This approach gave her the opportunity to identify urgent problems of modern legal science and propose ways to resolve them. The review notes the deep study of legal sources, as well as scientific literature of various centuries, carried out in the course of the study.