Historical roots and current state of the “public - private law” issue in French legal doctrine

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Abstract

The Soviet legal system did not know the division of law into private and public, because communist ideology did not recognize anything private. The end of communist experiment and transition to legal state, social market economy and respect for human rights naturally led to the need to revive private law and to further develop it; therefore in Russian jurisprudence the issue of dividing the law into private and public has become relevant. The subject is the French legal doctrine on this issue; the study is carried out on the unpublished in Russia sources. The historical roots of the basic division of law and its significance for the French legal system are in the focus. Despite the absence of rigid boundaries in this division, the theory describing it is based on the real legal reality of the Romano-Germanic family of legal systems. This theory is not abstract theorizing; it is useful for practice because it aims to maintain a balance between public law and private law regulation. The issue of basic division of law in the case law system is discussed. A comparative study of the issue in the Russian legal doctrine is conducted. The author comes to the conclusion that human rights are the common part that unites public and private law, and therefore their unity is inextricable: the abrogation of private law, as the experience of building communism in Russia showed, inevitably leads to the destruction of human rights, and then to the transformation of public law into a pseudo-legal system.

About the authors

Alexey P. Semitko

Liberal Arts University

Author for correspondence.
Email: asemitko@mail.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4425-3053

Doctor of Legal sciences, Senior Resercher of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Full Professor and Head of the Department of Public Law, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Liberal Arts University; Visiting Professor of the University of Paris Nanterre (France); Honorary Worker of Higher Professional Education of the Russian Federation; Laureate of Sergey Sergeyevich Alekseev Prize “For Merit in Jurisprudence” (2021)

3 Zheleznodorozhnikov, Yekaterinburg, 620041, Russian Federation

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