Court Judgement as a Jural Fact in Civil Law: Doctrinal Discourse and the Problem of Legal Formulations
Authors:   Perm State University, Golubtsov V. G. 
Published: August 2021

Introduction: the role of the court judgement that determines civil rights and obligations remains not completely perceived in civil law. In the modern science of civil law, no definite theoretical views on this subject have yet been formed, except for those that were formulated in the period when the science was actively discussing the very fact of referring court judgements to jural facts of civil law. In the article, we address this issue through reviewing, analyzing and generalizing the existing scientific views, with inter-disciplinary aspects also involved. The scope of study includes the disputable issues of the legislative definition of the court judgement seen as the basis for the commencement of civil rights and obligations and also the analysis of methodological positions significant for the research. Purpose: while taking the theory of modificatory claims as what is recognized in the modern doctrine of civil procedural law, to investigate the right-establishing force of the court judgement defined by the legislator as a jural fact of civil law. Methods: the methodological framework of the research is based on the general scientific method of scientific cognition, which reflects the relationship between the doctrine and law enforcement, as well as methods of dialectics, analysis, synthesis, analogy, functional, interdisciplinary, and system approaches. Results: the article proposes a system of concepts with the court judgment in its civil law meaning of a jural fact of substantive law lying at the core. Based on this system, we can state that the relationship between such concepts as the ‘court judgement’ and the ‘jural fact of substantive law’ is to a greater extent speculative. It is not sufficient to explain a court judgement as the basis for the commencement of civil law relations only based on the theory of procedural law, which divides all claims into declarative and constitutive ones. We argue that the concept ‘court judgement’ in its substantive meaning has a dual civil law function: (1) in the meaning of its right-restorative function – as a result of the protection of a violated civil right, and (2) as one of the grounds for the establishment of civil rights and obligations resulting from a private person’s initiative and the court authority. The right of the court to deliver right-establishing judgements that become one of the legal regulation elements within civil law, is an exception to the general civil law rule implying the discretionary method of regulation, according to which the parties determine their rights and obligations by mutual agreement. Following the analysis of the doctrinal views on the concept of the court judgement in its substantive meaning, which many authors consider to be the one not corresponding to its broader procedural meaning, we justify the position that there are no obvious grounds for diagnosticating the alleged contradiction between substantive and procedural legislation in terms of the logical scope of the ‘court judgement’ concept. It is more important to see the real legal meaning of this concept in the civil law reality, which involves a combination of the substantive law significance of a court judgement for establishing civil rights and obligations and the public law essence of this act, which is manifested not in private actions of the interested persons themselves but in unilateral actions of the court as a public law subject. We also formulated some methodological positions that could serve as theoretical guidelines for further research into the problem of the court judgement as one of the jural facts of civil law.