Criminal Trial: from Dogmatism towards Realism
Abstract
Russia has become famous for masterpieces of realism in art and literature. In the Soviet Union, realism (albeit with the definition of «socialist») became the dominant creative method. The leaders of the Soviet state, without abandoning communist phraseology and support for revolutionary movements, were able to pursue foreign policy and build relations with the capitalist world in line with political realism. However, before legal realism, the powerful flow of which covered two continents at once for half a century, a solid barrier was placed in Soviet jurisprudence, which has not been removed to this day. In the research the author sets the following tasks in this regard: 1) to form a general idea of legal realism, focusing on the promotion of realistic ideas in Russian legal science in general and criminal procedure science in particular; 2) to consider a number of the most relevant and controversial problems of the criminal process from the point of view of legal realism; 3) to propose the basic principles of scientific research in the criminal procedure sphere in the paradigm of legal realism. The subject of the study is the individual norms of criminal procedure law in the form in which they are applied in reality, the differences between the normative model and the real content of criminal procedural relations. Thus, the author discusses the purpose of criminal proceedings, as well as the principle of competition in relation to the methods of evaluating the results of investigative activities. The relationship between criminal procedural and managerial relations in criminal justice bodies is shown, and the assessment of the procedural independence of the investigator, the public prosecutor and the independence of judges in relation to the norms of organizational behavior is given. Applying legal realism as the main academic approach, the author uses both the dogmatic method in the article in order to identify the content of the norms of written law, and the historical method in combination with comparative law in order to understand the origins and meaning of the transformation of certain criminal procedural institutions, and the sociological method (interview of investigators). The hypothesis of the study is changing the paradigm of legal understanding from dogmatic to realistic will provide a more accurate explanation of the causes of the contradictions that arise in the application of criminal procedure law, and will help to develop ways to optimize it more than just a mechanical change in legislation.
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