Key Plots of Legal Thinking. Book Review: Permyakov Yu. E. Contemporary Philosophy of Law: An Overview of the Main Problems

Abstract

The review provides a detailed account of the textbook by Yuri Evgenievich Permyakov “Contemporary Philosophy of Law: An Overview of the Main Problems” (St. Petersburg: Lan’, 2023). The author’s contribution to clarifying the province and structure of the discipline, its role in the formation of legal thinking is emphasized. The originality of the proposed reading from the point of view of the metaphysics of law of such categories as agent, ought, judicial authority, subjective right, obligation is noted. The author brings important emphases to the discussion of controversial issues of the boundaries of the law as well as of scientific status and tasks of jurisprudence. Yu. E. Permyakov considers the main task of jurisprudence in general and legal science in particular to be the drawing a line between law and non-law. In view of this task, he examines issues of the legal force of normative and law enforcement acts and of a dispute as an immanent condition of legal life. The author’s proposal to replace the perspective accepted in legal theory, in which the agent of law is considered to be a legal norm, with a “reverse perspective” associated with the concept of a legal construction seems pertinent. Seeing the ontological basis of legal institutions and the starting point of the analysis of law in the claims of the individual, and the most important task of law — in preserving the human cosmos in a state of unity, Yu. E. Permyakov associates the current crisis of law with the inability of the agent to acquire shape, declaring his claims to status, and with the crisis of sociality, in which society loses itself as a whole. The author analyzes the phenomena of provincial comprehension of law and political manipulation of legal consciousness as factors that are directly related to the crisis, reflects on how the latter manifests itself in legal practice, legal science and education.