Evolution of scientific concepts about citizens’ participation in the administration of justice in Soviet jurisprudence

Introduction. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of research in the domestic historical and legal science on the participation of citizens in the administration of justice as an independent doctrinal construct. This issue is mainly considered within the framework of the general characteristics of the Soviet judicial system or individual procedural institutions.

The purpose of the article was to identify the stages of the formation of scientific ideas about the participation of citizens in the administration of justice in Soviet legal science, changes in doctrinal approaches to its nature, functions and limits, as well as to determine their influence on the organization of judicial activity.

The methodological basis of the study is a historical-legal approach, which allows us to consider the development of scientific ideas about the participation of citizens in the administration of justice in the context of changes in legal policy and regulatory regulation. The work uses formal legal, comparative legal and hermeneutic methods, as well as the method of scientific reconstruction in the study of regulations and scientific works of Soviet jurists.

Results and conclusions. The article proves that the development of Soviet legal ideas about the participation of citizens in justice was of a stage-by-stage nature and was determined by a change in its theoretical justification. It has been established that citizen participation has been consistently conceptualized as a way of directly exercising state power, as an element of the institutional organization of a centralized judicial system, and as a characteristic of justice in a nation-wide state. It is shown that while maintaining the basic institutions, the content of citizen participation was transformed depending on ideas about the nature of the Soviet court and the tasks of justice. It is concluded that Soviet legal science has formed a holistic doctrinal model of citizen participation in justice, based on a combination of expanding forms of participation with institutional restrictions on their content. Representatives of the public were recognized as participants in justice, but their activities were embedded in a professionally organized judicial system and subordinated to its logic.

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