The author attempts to formulate modern trends in domestic criminal law, continuing the traditional approaches to the definition of historically existing schools in the theory of criminal law (primarily classical and sociological). They were based on the alleged answers of the doctrine to the most important tasks facing criminal law, and, first of all, the problems of constructing criminal law prohibitions and punishments and other coercive measures of a criminal nature, criminalization, decriminalization, relying on their commission. The specification of these main controversial (in modern criminal law doctrine) issues is carried out in the article on a number of aspects of the theme. These include: the prospect of administrative responsibility as a prerequisite for criminal responsibility and punishment; the idea of introducing into the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, along with the concept of crime, also the concept of “criminal misconduct”; clarification of the definition of normative (formal) sources of criminal legislation; the legal nature of the recommendations of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on the application of criminal legislation (and in a broader sense — the role of judicial interpretation, the possibility or impossibility of taking it into account when considering a particular criminal case); the problem of introducing criminal liability of legal entities into criminal legislation. The content of the article is based on a generalization of doctrinal views on the topic under consideration in the theory of criminal law, a generalization of the law-making practice of the domestic legislator, law enforcement judicial practice, including the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, official statistics on the registration of the number of crimes committed in the country and punishments imposed by courts for their commission. Certain variants of these doctrinal ideas are linked to the specifics of the changed geopolitical conditions (including those related to the modern confrontation between the West (USA, EU-NATO) and Russia.