Acts of Constitutional Justice as Sources of Russian Civil Procedural Law

Abstract

The article focuses upon the significance of acts of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation for national civil procedure law and identifies their place in the legal system. The author leaves the field of legal positivism and uses both the teleological way of law interpretation and the axiological method to the understanding of law. The author proceeds with analysis of the legislation regulating the activities of the Constitutional Court mentioned and its decisions and compares the competence, the content and the form of activity of this institution with those of legislative bodies. The article brings out the importance of constitutional justice acts for national civil proceedings and the place of these acts in the system of sources (of forms) of Russian civil procedure law. Particular attention is given to the fact that acts of the Constitutional Court have some features which are common to a normative legal act, as well as that it is impossible to classify its acts as judicial precedents. The author comes to the conclusion that the source (the form) of civil procedure law is the entire act of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation (both in its resolution and motivation parts). Moreover, this act is inseparable from the text of a law being subject to the assessment of its constitutionality, but not from the text of the Russian Constitution. The examples are cited in the article prove that the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation fills gaps in legal regulation and introduces new civil procedure norms. Its acts effectively play part of a source (a form) of civil procedure law in the following cases: when they produce definitive conclusions on determining a civil procedure norm as inconsistent with the Constitution of the Russian Federation; at the same time, in order to fill the emerging gap, it is common to introduce a temporary norm in addition to the “negative” one, which is valid till the adoption of the correspondent normative legal act; when, while leaving a civil procedure norm formally unchanged, its constitutional legal meaning is revealed and, in most cases, it differs considerably from the meaning given to this norm by the existing law enforcement practice, hence, in fact it creates a new generally binding rule of behavior. The author draws attention to the necessity to enshrine explicitly this status of constitutional justice acts.