The Nature of Professional Legal Consciousness Deformation (A Case Study of Advocates’ Work)

The quality and level of development of legal consciousness of an advocate predetermines the degree of protection of human rights and freedoms, as well as the state of law and legal order. Taking into account the above, the struggle against manifestations of deformation of professional and legal consciousness is an urgent  problem of building a rule-of-law state. Prevention and elimination of professional deformation of the advocate is impossible without establishing the reasons for its occurrence. The paper is devoted to the study of the essence of deformation of legal consciousness of the advocate, identification of external and internal factors contributing to its appearance, as well as investigation of the reasons of formation of this negative phenomenon of legal reality manifested in advocates’ work. It is noted that the circumstances leading to distortions of professional legal consciousness affect all the representatives of the legal community equally or almost equally, but only a smaller portion of legal professionals violate legal norms and corporate ethics. A legitimate question arises concerning the reasons why these “anomalies” of the structure of legal consciousness appear in some cases and do not appear in the others. Based on general methods of cognition and such private scientific methods as empirical and comparative legal methods, the author draws the following conclusion: moral degrading of an individual becomes the “trigger” of professional deformation of both a lawyer and any other person. The moral structure of the individual includes individually formed ideas about conscience, shame, justice, measure of the allowable, etc.

legal consciousness, professional legal consciousness, deformation, degradation, external factors, internal factors, advocate, morality, conscience

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