Doctrinal legal consciousness and professional legal consciousness of a lawyer: the relationship and significance for society
Authors: Shelyh A. А. 
Published: August 2021

The focus is on the legal awareness of legal scholars and legal practitioners. However, before we begin to consider the features of these types of legal consciousness, we need to clarify the concept of legal awareness, which is the cornerstone of our study. Note that the study of this concept has a long history, dating back to antiquity. Philosophers, and later scientists, tried to define the phenomenon of legal consciousness. It is the long historical process of forming ideas about legal consciousness that has led to the existence of many different definitions of this category.

First of all, it is necessary to pay attention to the importance of this type of legal awareness, because legal doctrine plays a key role in the process of lawmaking and law enforcement. A striking example is the legislator’s appeal in the process of rule-making to the basic dogmas of law and morality, to the ideas of natural law, and in the event of conflicts – to various scientifically sound ways to solve them. In addition, in Ukraine it should become a rule for deputies to seek advice from the country’s leading scientists to ensure the effectiveness of rule-making. However, deputies usually do this infrequently or do not take into account the opinions of reputable scholars, which has a negative impact on the state of Ukrainian legislation. In order to understand the value of a scientist’s opinion, it is necessary to find out the features of scientific legal consciousness. Scientific legal consciousness is a set of ideas, concepts, views that reflect a systematic, theoretical knowledge of law.

The legal consciousness of a scientist, in contrast to the everyday legal consciousness of a citizen, is formed through a deep and thorough study of socio-legal reality. Legal awareness of legal scholars is formed on the basis of purposeful research using special methods of cognition, which provide for the establishment of truth as a result of systematization, generalization of the obtained reliable facts relating to legal reality.

The complexity of doctrinal legal consciousness is due to its versatility, because this type of legal consciousness is characterized by a synthesis of elements of political, moral, religious and economic consciousness. It is also important to remember that doctrine is recognized as a source of law and therefore creates a legal relationship. Therefore, scholars face an important and responsible task - to form a high-quality, meaningful and effective doctrine that will be an important source of law and which will prevent the formalization of law and its «death».

Attention is paid to the complexity of lawyers. In particular, it is the presence of high requirements for his business and moral qualities. Knowledge of social norms, stable immunity to legal nihilism and immorality, upbringing, excluding motives of personal impartiality, subjectivism, abuse of power or official position, a morally stable person – these are the main qualities of the character of lawyers.

The main means of forming legal awareness of lawyers include legal education and legal education. After all, these tools are the primary (basic) elements of the mechanism of formation of legal awareness in future professionals in the field of law, whose action is aimed at developing legal competence, which provides an integrated ability to fully implement in practice knowledge, methods, experience of lawful behavior, legal values models of legal behavior. Of course, neither legal education nor legal education covers the whole complex of formation of individual legal consciousness of a lawyer, but they are determining factors in this process.

The main functions of this type of legal consciousness are studied. These include: cognitive, aimed at obtaining legal knowledge, information about current legislation and the specifics of its application in practice, evaluation, which is implemented through the assessment legally significant events, phenomena, circumstances and documents, as well as comparing them with accepted values and norms in society; regulatory, allows you to form a mechanism for regulating behavior or action, taking into account the legal framework.

The correlation of these types of legal consciousness is determined, firstly, doctrinal legal consciousness has a constructive character, as opposed to professional legal consciousness, which is normative. It is important that in each of the types the dominant property is not combined with similar properties characteristic of other types of legal consciousness.

Secondly, the main element of doctrinal legal consciousness is the conceptual idea, and professional legal consciousness is the norm. Third, the understanding of law, regardless of its type, is inherent only in doctrinal legal consciousness. In turn, professional legal awareness is characterized by legal knowledge. Fourth, the compared types of legal consciousness differ in the dominant mechanisms of action: in doctrinal legal consciousness the mechanism of faith dominates, in professional legal consciousness – the mechanism of ideology.

It should be noted that only in the close interaction of legal awareness of legal scholars and legal practitioners is it possible to achieve the development and improvement of our legal system. Scholars fill law with meaning, forming legal ideology, and lawyers in practice implement the dogmas of law and in the process of professional activity identify new issues to be studied and solved by scientists, creating an effective mechanism that improves with the emergence of new types and areas of public relations.

Keywords: legal awareness, professions on legal awareness of a lawyer, society.