Legal responsibility: socio-regulatory context for ensuring effectiveness.
Authors: S Sunegin 
Published: June 2020

Introduction. In the proposed article, the author at a theoretical level explores the problematic issues of ensuring the effectiveness of legal responsibility in the context of the modern value realities of liberal-and-democratic development.

The aim of the article. The purpose of this article is to develop conceptual provisions of the social-and- normative context for ensuring the effectiveness of legal liability.

Results. The problem of increasing the efficiency of functioning of the institution of legal responsibility is metanormative, because its solution goes beyond the possibilities of law as a special socio-normative system and depends directly on the concerted action of all social regulators, formed within the socio-cultural tradition of a particular nation and people. Although legal liability has lawful nature in both, positive and negative aspects, it is always linked to the realization of specific legal requirements, its subjective basis is the individual will and consciousness, the proper influence of which cannot be attained beyond the context of the high level of public authority of traditional moral principles and norms, which throughout the long history of mankind have constantly confirmed their decisive and paramount importance for ensuring any social transformation.

The effectiveness of legal liability cannot be objectively achieved solely by ensuring a qualitative legal impact on its negative form of implementation, because setting a person up for legitimate behavior, as well as the stability of the latter, regardless of the specific external conditions or circumstances, presupposes the presence of an internal conscious conviction of the subject in the necessity, expediency and usefulness of the realization of legal norms. The basis of such inner conviction is, first and foremost, a personal sense of respect for the law as a social regulator, capable of useful and effective influence on multifaceted social relations, and one of the necessary preconditions for its securing is the real domination in the society and the state of the system of interconnected moral-and-law values, the relaying of which must be maintained at all levels of informative-and-communicative connections.

A person's unlawful behavior and activities are always the result of a low level of positive legal liability, a disrespectful attitude to specific legal rules and law in general. At the same time, the improvement of the positive form of legal liability is based not so much on law, but on a high level of moral consciousness of the individual and moral «climate» in society. From this follows the real impossibility to increase the effectiveness of the institution of legal responsibility in state in the context of devaluation of the importance of moral regulation of will, consciousness and relations in society.

Conclusions. Improving the functioning of the institution of legal responsibility in modern democratic realities requires the formation and maintenance of real social action of the system of moral-and-law values, the necessity, usefulness and priority of which has been repeatedly demonstrated in many historical examples. It should be borne in mind that the formation of such a value system is a complex and long-lasting process that is influenced by many interrelated and interdependent factors, in particular, a certain historical tradition, peculiarities of folk mentality, culture and art as one of the ways of perception and cognition of the surrounding world, social ideology, family education and other social institutions, etc. That is why attempts to establish such a system of values only with the help of appropriate power and legal means cannot produce positive results, but on the contrary, will contribute to the growth of social anomie in society.