On the object and subject of criminal law comparative studies

The doctrine of comparative law, practically revived in the new Russia, is one of the most dynamically developing and promising areas of the domestic legal science of our time. Due to its traditional branch division, its criminallegal part is no exception, the authors of the article offer their own view of the object and subject of which. The work consists of several parts that logically consistently lead the reader to an understanding of the volume, complexity and consistency of the subject of comparative criminal law. Having determined at the very beginning of the article with the understanding of the object of legal comparative studies (which is defined as a set of legal systems of individual countries), the authors, first of all, designate a number of parameters of the doctrinal complexity of this object: terminological, methodological, historical, legal and technical, etc. So, the term «legal system» itself can currently be interpreted in at least three main meanings, and the temporal factor makes it also difficult to fix. As an example, the second part of the article provides brief characteristics of the three leading legal families of our time and four representing the first two – Anglo-American and Romano-German – legal families (in the author’s understanding of this term). Special attention is paid to the historical (i.e. objective) conditionality of the deep originality and complex «multilayering» of individual national legal systems of countries, even belonging to a single family of the modern legal world. The research conducted in this way allows the authors in the third, summarizing part of the article to formulate not just the subject of criminal law comparative studies, as they declared in the very title of the work, but its most relevant part, which, in their opinion, is expressed by three levels of problems arising in the process of studying the criminal law components of the legal systems of individual countries and their comparison with the subsystem of criminal law of the domestic legal system.

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