Features of Forming the Legal Consciousness in the Modern Settings and Its Influence on the State of Lawfulness

Introduction. The Constitution of the Russian Federation defines the benchmarks ensuring an appropriate level of development for the important spheres of life, a high living standard, which requires a comprehensive approach to forming the human potential of the generations of the Russian citizens. The quintessence of the Russian statehood strategic development implies minimisation of the prerequisites inducing formation of the destructive legal consciousness in citizens, which obstructs achievement of the legal order in the country. In the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation, among the list of national interests, a significant place is allocated to saving the people of Russia, to development of the human potential. The state strategic planning document had defined the following goals: upbringing a harmoniously developed and socially responsible citizen, forming in the society the attitude of intolerance to illegal activities. No doubt, in Russia, the trend of the power exercising mechanism to undergo modern institutional changes is caused by the social modernization and is targeted at the conceptual ideas of the constitutionalism. The economic and socio-political transformations inevitably affect not only formation of the legal environment, but also structuring the public consciousness, which concepts predetermine the development of the reasoned and practically oriented legal solutions. The state of the public perception of the legal phenomena should be constantly monitored due to the continuous impact imposed on it by the transformations in the state structure of the governmental and administrative authorities. The scientific understanding of these processes should not be underestimated, otherwise this can cause the psychological turbulence of a significant part of the population in choosing the behavioural patterns of lawful behaviour. In the context of transformation of the social determination process, which is attributed with a complicated range of the antisocially-motivated impacts, significantly limiting the preventive social and law enforcement potential, the present research is relevant due to the special importance assigned to precise, steady and uniform application of the legislative provisions, the degree of their functional social harmonisation in the social relation regulation mechanism. The deformations of the citizens’ legal consciousness are the factors hindering the achievement of the high efficiency in implementation of the fundamental principles of the supremacy of law. The research aims at investigating the functional role of the legal consciousness in the legal regulation mechanism of the modern social formations, at analysing the problems of exercising the state policy in the frame of forming the positive perception of the legal phenomena among the citizens and revealing the interrelations of the legal consciousness deformations and stimulation of the legitimate behavioural variation.

Materials and Methods. The article analyses the results of the research of the native and foreign scientists on the regularities in the public perception of the state and legal phenomena and impact thereof on the legitimate behavioural variation. The general scientific and specific scientific methods were used in the research, such as the statistical method and the method of system analysis of data characteristic of the phenomena affecting the state of lawfulness in Russia.

Results. The regularities in the functional role of the legal consciousness within the mechanism of legal regulation of the social relations have been acknowledged. The substance of the legal consciousness interrelations with the legal ideology and legal psychology has been revealed. The problems of efficiency of the state policy in forming the civil legal consciousness have been determined. It has been proposed to integrate into the scholarly discourse such a type of legal consciousness deformation as legal dementia, which predetermines the state of lawfulness in the modern Russian society.

Discussion and Conclusion. The practical side of the legal consciousness reflects the behavioural attitudes of a person, his readiness to use in practice his theoretical knowledge and value assessments. The law-related feelings, emotions, ideas, principles, attitudes that have become a part of a person’s legal consciousness, subsequently determine his actions in the legal framework. To ensure protection of the national mental values and to prevent emergence of the destructive attitudes in the society, changes in the educational, scientific, cultural and other spheres should be made taking into account the historical traditions and the experience accumulated by the Russian society. Unfortunately, nowadays, among the main problems of the lawmaking and law enforcement processes in Russia are weak scientific and analytical justification of the draft laws, low quality of laws, acute legal collisions within the law system, violations of the intra-system relations that result in a tendency of citizens’ legal estrangement.

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