Terminology in the Drafts on the Reform of Criminal Law and Procedure in Russia during the First Quarter of the 18th Century

Introduction: The paper is devoted to the development of legal terminology in Russia in the context of the formation of a modern legal language. This research examines the specific terminology of the judicial reform drafts prepared by the Legislation commission of the 1720s.

Methodology and materials: The source base of survey is based on drafts prepared by the Legislation commission by 1726 and currently placed in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. The analysis focuses on the criminal law and criminal procedure sections of the draft Code of the Russian State. The research employs formal-legal and historical methods, as well as quantitative content analysis.

Research results: An examination of the legislative drafts produced by the Legislative commission of the 1720s reveals that the proposed code of criminal procedure was distinguished by its coherence, logical structure, and the precision of the terminology used to describe procedural actions. This was largely a consequence of the synthetic integration of domestic and foreign legal norms, as well as the introduction of new principles of legal drafting into the commissions’ work. These principles were borrowed from foreign legal sources, primarily Swedish and Danish. However, in the criminal law section of this future codified act, such terminological precision and clarity were not as pronounced. This section did not offer overarching concepts for defining offenses and offenders, nor a unified nomenclature for types of crimes, responding to a social reality that was undergoing radical and still-unfinalized changes.

Conclusions: The terminological polyphony inherent in the criminal law section of the draft Code points to an incomplete process of forming a legal language. Within this process, terms competed with each other, and each of the concepts used had the potential to become major. However, the process was not completed, and uniform terminology was failed to emerge. Simultaneously, the active recourse to foreign models — rational, motivated, and meticulously calibrated against the current normative landscape — acted as a catalyst for renovating legal technique and the methodologies for organizing legislative material. The observed changes outline a perspective for a reinterpretation of the development of Russian criminal law, a trajectory traditionally linked to the emergence of jurisprudence as an academic discipline.

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