On the Lives of Modern State Law

Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.

Logical Design of Legal Education. Towards the Anniversary of Kutafin Moscow State Law University

The paper deals with the problem of interrelation between two research programs — logic and jurisprudence — from antiquity to the present. Traditional logic has created and developed the Great Triad “Concept — Judgment — Inference” that has become an educational and methodological canon of humanitarian knowledge and education in general and legal knowledge and legal education in particular. The doctrine of the concept, the doctrine of judgment, the doctrine of inference (more precisely, the doctrine of proof) are essentially used in legal proceedings, law-making, and law enforcement. The author resorts to modern achievements of the theory and technology of scientific knowledge as a research methodology. Logical knowledge itself appears in the form of methodology. Under this approach, any science, both natural and humanitarian, necessarily defines its conceptual corpus. Any science, creating its own description of the subject area, uses theoretical provisions in the form of a set of theses and arguments expressed by judgments. Any science substantiates its vision of the world using a system of evidence. All these properties are subject to and correspond to the subject of logics taught in every law school in the context of legal logics or logics for lawyers. The place of logic in the framework of legal education is considered as a hierarchy of problems of the relation between the phenomena of “the logical” and “the legal” within the framework of the world-historical process, the relation between the phenomena of “the logical” and “the legal” within the framework of domestic history and domestic education system before 1917, i.e., before the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Soviet power, the relation between the phenomena of “the legal” and “the logical” in Soviet and post-Soviet history, creation of an education system, including legal education, in our country and the development of the logical science and logical education at Kutafin Moscow State Law University. The uniqueness of the study is associated with the use of the Transcript of the All-Soviet Meeting of Logic Teachers of Higher Educational Institutions held on June 21–26, 1948 in Moscow discovered and introduced into scientific circulation by the author of the paper. The result of the study proves the special importance of logic for lawyers as a reliable tool in situations of lawmaking, law enforcement and interpretation of legal norms.

Political Regime or State (State-Law) Regime?

The article emphasizes and substantiates the leading place of the political (state, state-legal) regime in the system of elements of the state form. Attention is paid to the correlation of political, state and state-legal regime, emphasizing that the latter characterizes democratic states.

Political Regime or State (State-Law) Regime?

The article emphasizes and substantiates the leading place of the political (state, state-legal) regime in the system of elements of the state form. Attention is paid to the correlation of political, state and state-legal regime, emphasizing that the latter characterizes democratic states.

Philosophical Foundations for Understanding the System of Law

The article deals with a problem of correlation between the evolution of the main ideas pattern, philosophical foundations of the intellectual life of age and historical state-law systems. The method is a cyclic conception of history, according to which on every round of historical processes, the framework of state-law system development was formed by the main ideas presumption about space, time, the mul­tiplicity of the world and so on. According to it, authors argue that the existence of some milestones in the history of ideas gives us an opportunity to highlight some phases of the state-law system evolution, such as temple-state with its mythological space and cyclic time; polis state, which emerged from rationalization and understanding the world is multiple; medieval theological state with its dualism and teleological history conception; modern state based on separation of abstract conceptions such as nation and their embodiment.

Death in Times of SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic. Legal Regulations of the Burial of the COVID-19 Deceased in Poland

The article discusses the issues of death in times of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and burial of the COVID-19 deceased. It also presents some currently binding legal regulations as well as restrictions and obligations for the organizers of the funeral connected with the infection of the deceased with COVID-19. Moreover, it shows the influence of state law on funeral regulations in the denominational form and the cult of memory of the dead.

Risks of Using “Language Relief” and Plain Language Principles in the Process of Applying Tax Law – Selected Issues

The level of communicativeness of official letters in the field of tax law leaves much to be desired. The article concerns the consequences of the application of “Language Relief” in the practice of applying tax law by the National Revenue Administration. The author calls for the principles of plain language to be introduced first in relation to acts of state law, so that officials can adapt their letters to the plain language of the law. A reversal of this order poses significant risks to the protection of taxpayers’ rights since internal instructions and letter templates proposed on the NRA intranet will be used to a greater extent instead of legal acts.

Islam, Fatwa dan Negara: Meretas Pluralisme Hukum Perceraian di Aceh

The pluralism of divorce in Aceh has had an impact on the current practice of divorce. Fatwa, Jurisprudence, and the State also color the pluralism of divorce law, each of which has a normative and sociological power base. The Aceh MPU's fatwa tends to legitimize divorce regulated in fiqh books while the State has a different view of divorce law. This paper is a doctrinal study with a legal pluralism approach. This article argues that in substance there is a significant difference between the divorce provisions in the fatwa, fiqh, and state law. Fatwa and fiqh share the same view that divorce without witnesses and taking place outside the court is still valid, as well as triple talaq, whether pronounced cumulatively or separately, is still subject to triple talaq, this provision is different from divorce law which is regulated by the state and practiced in religious courts.