Legal reality examination reveals contradictions and uncertainties that make the researcher think about the correctness of the tasks and tools of doctrinal cognition. In modern science, a wide range of means of cognition have been developed, which makes it possible to overcome such situations and achieve the expected outcomes. One of the jurisprudence methodological resources includes the logical form of paired categories. This method is used to reveal the interaction between non-polar elements in any phenomenon, to form the most complete model of the process or mechanism functioning, etc. In the paper, the author proposes to examine the process of legal regulation through the linkage of the concepts "action of the law — opposition to the implementation of the law." The phenomena under consideration possess not only the distinctive properties, but also the properties that conciliate them. This made it possible to consider the interaction between the operation of the law and the counteraction to it within the framework of legal regulation. On the basis of the algorithm of categories pairing, the study concludes that the action of the law and the opposition to it are subordinate to the law of the unity and struggle of opposites. The development of the unity of the opposites under consideration is taking place in the course of legal regulation representing a contradiction expressed in two mutually exclusive statements: "legal regulation is determined by the operation of the law," "legal regulation is determined by opposition to the law."

Using authentical law enforcement acts of Russian courts issued in 1912, 1918 and 1947, the paper illustrates the change in approaches in criminal procedural legislation to the form and content of a court decision (a sentence), the peculiarities of its introductory, descriptive-rationale and operative parts. Particular attention is paid to the differences substantiated by the principles of legal proceedings, the circle of participants, the stage structure of the process and other fundamental features of the criminal procedure of a particular historical period. The paper elucidates that the presentation in the narrative part of the verdict of the full text of the jury’s decision and the jury’s responses constitutes the specifics of the decisions reached by the jury in the post-reform period. It is noted that limited data on the personality of the criminal in comparison with the later stages is provided. It is shown that the defendant’s sanity determination was assigned to the jury, rather than to the presiding judge. The indication in the jury’s decision of two dates—the date of the jury’s decision pronouncement by the court and the date of public announcement—was pre-conditioned by the procedure for calculating the term assigned to appeal the verdict. Two sentences from the Soviet period illustrate the change in the size of the panel of the court and the way in which citizens participated in the administration of justice. The author highlights the lack of analysis of evidence in Russian sentences up to 1934. The paper provides for the assessment of the specified features of the court decisions. The author concludes that it is necessary to establish guarantees for the issuance of legal, reasonable and fair sentences, including sentences in reduced proceedings.

Based on the activities of the philosophical and legal club "Moral Dimension of Law," the author attempts to comprehend the reasons for the long-term charisma of this open, self-governing academic and educational organization operating on the basis of the university department of philosophy and sociology. The paper substantiates the idea that it is the ethical character, the corresponding motivated and consistent efforts in the direction of improving morality in law that determine the stable interest on the part of students (and not only students). Behind this lies the socio-cultural need for the reproduction and cultivation of spiritual bonds. At the moment of the unity of the objective (true values) and the subjective (freedom at the personal level), a spark of living creativity appears, which cannot be evoked somehow artificially and edifyingly. Persistent demonstration of the mission of restoring justice also attracts due to its opposition to the evil. It is also important to understand the importance of constant moral and philosophical examination of problems and situations, which is directly related to improving the quality of training professionals.

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the correlation between the concept, essence and social functions of the judiciary of the Russian Federation. The author examines the main features of the dominant approaches in the domestic legal doctrine to the concept of the judicial power as a type of social power, a form of exercising state power and organizationally and procedurally formalized coercion with its inherent legal properties. Based on the analysis of theoretical and legal sources, to develop the concept of the judiciary, the author determines its essence as: a form of administration of social processes by resolving social conflicts; specific activities of state bodies through the constitutional, civil, administrative and criminal proceedings (justice) established by the Constitution of the Russian Federation; methods of using specific means of coercion on behalf of the state. In order to specify the concept and essence of the judiciary in Russia, the author examines its functions of ensuring constitutional law and order, legal protection, restoring violated rights, imposing legal responsibility on the offender, legal education, raising legal awareness and respect for the rights of citizens. The author makes a number of proposals aimed to improve the implementation of these functions in terms of respect for the law and the court, including by improving the activities of the courts themselves, expanding the openness and accessibility of certain judicial information through the National Automated Sistem "Justice" (GAS) of the Russian Federation and social networks.

The paper substantiates the author’s proposal to amend the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which is explained by the gradual creation of a digital economy in the Russian Federation. In particular, the author has examined and solved the following problems of the legal regulation of civil law relations in the context of digitalization: the problem of identifying the object of digital rights, the problem of legal qualification of the electronic form of the transaction, the problem of using a smart contract in civil transactions, the problem of using blockchain technology to create mixed payment systems. The paper proposes a non-standard solution to each of these problems—the author has prepared a draft federal law "On Amendments to Parts One and Two of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation in terms of legal relations arising in cyberspace." In particular, the author proposes to define digital rights as the absolute and relative rights to digital property named in this capacity, the content and conditions of implementation of which are determined by the law and the rules of the information system (protocol) that meets the characteristics established by the law. In the author’s opinion, an electronic document can exist in the form of a machine information file of any format or a computer program that meets the characteristics of an electronic document.

The purpose of the paper is to show how actively and effectively the mechanism of analogy of law is used in modern practice of applying civil legislation. Based on the analysis of judicial acts in specific cases, the author substantiates the conclusion concerning the regularity of the expansion of the application of the analogy of law in judicial practice. The importance of using this mechanism to ensure the absence of gaps in law is demonstrated not only for the administration of justice, but also for effective civil law regulation of the continuously developing economic relations of organizationally and property-separated enterprising participants (subjects). The author substantiates a new view on the correlation between the increase in the volume and detail of the normative material and the level of civil legal certainty and with the degree of demand for the analogy of law in the activities of law enforcement officers. It is proposed to keep selecting and examining specific examples of the use of the analogy of law in the resolution of civil disputes in order to provide generalizations and explanations of the practice of direct application of the principles of civil legislation at the level of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.

The forms of commercialization of innovations, due to their uniqueness, are quite diverse. The monetary method of maintaining competition is outdated. In this regard, legal instruments, institutional environment and institutions for the development of innovations—technoparks, technopolises, business incubators, scientific and technological centers—are being increasingly used. Such catalysts of knowledge and innovation consolidate the interests of the State, business and society. The paper examines the innovation infrastructure in the context of law, identifies the problems of commercialization of rights to the results of intellectual activity (RIA). The author carries out a sistematic analysis of the Russian regulatory framework for innovation, commercialization of innovation and RIA, and the legal framework for the activities of innovation development institutions. It is substantiated that the protection of the results of intellectual activity and the legislative consolidation of a set of measures for the protection of intellectual property represent the most important backbone elements of the national innovation system. When analyzing the legal framework for the creation of technology parks, business incubators and innovative scientific and technological centers, their significant participation in the commercialization of RIA was revealed. However, legal support for participants in innovative activities, entrepreneurs for state registration and protection of rights to RIA is carried out insufficiently and fragmentarily. The author examines the foreign experience of technoparks’ activities, their types and legal regulation.

Most legal orders establish several forms of design protection that are not mutually exclusive. At the same time, the intersection of legal regimes gives rise to a number of practical and doctrinal problems related to the determination of the scope of the author’s and rightholder’s rights, the unfair behavior of participants in civil transactions, and the erosion of the institutional purpose of intellectual property objects. The main task of the study is to draw a meaningful border between the two forms of protection of industrial design objects. The paper elucidates the basic concepts of understanding an industrial design, the functions and features of the activity under consideration, the relationship with the category of "art," examines the formation and development of legal thought about the relationship between copyright and patent forms of protection of the results of artistic design. It is concluded that it is necessary to make proposals and recommendations to eliminate unfair practices in the exercise of the right to protect the results of creative activity under consideration.

The Russian antimonopoly legislation establishes prohibitions in relation to various types of anticompetitive behavior of economic entities, including concerted actions that the legislator considers as a separate violation of antimonopoly legislation. Despite the existence and application of norms regarding the prohibition of concerted actions, there is no unity among scholars and practitioners in understanding both the very need for a prohibition of concerted actions in the legislation, and the essential features of this offense. Serious theoretical and practical problems also arise in the delimitation of concerted actions and another kind of anticompetitive behavior, namely: agreements that restrict competition. The paper concludes that the literal meaning of the term “concerted actions” does not correspond to the content of the normative regulation of this prohibited behavior, since concerted actions as a legal category represents a part of the more general concept of “agreement." There is also a lack of uniformity in differentiating competition-restricting agreements and concerted actions. The author argues that it is necessary to correct the name of such an offense as concerted actions and some of its signs, while generally maintaining the corresponding prohibition in the antimonopoly legislation.

Genomics methods and the results of genomic research are widely used in many areas of human activity. However, the rapid development of technologies leads to the fact that legal regulation does not take into account all their opportunities and risks. Thus, in recent years, the so-called direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DCGT), a type of genetic testing performed at the initiative of the consumer and for his personal purposes, has become widespread. The range of issues that the tests touch on is very wide: from the origin and family ties determination to recommendations for choosing an occupation and hobbies. In Russia, this industry is currently rapidly developing. At the same time, there is no legal regulation of the industry. The paper examines the foreign experience of DCGT services regulation. The authors show significant influence of the concept of "genetic exclusivity" on the legislation regulating this industry. However, the integrity of approaches to the regulation and the depth of consideration of controversial issues vary greatly. For the United States—the leader in both the number of companies providing DCGT services and the number of their clients—a self-regulation strategy remains the most characteristic one (at least until recently). Countries such as France, Germany, and Israel have adopted the tough stance against DCGTs, effectively prohibiting genetic testing without prescription. This is preconditioned by both the objective shortcomings of genetic tests and the originality of the historical past and social structure of these countries. We believe that the optimal way for Russia is self-regulation with the provision of the broadest and most objective information about the possibilities and limitations of DCGT on the part of professional communities (geneticists, bioethics specialists).

In modern criminal procedure law enforcement practice, the assessment of electronic (digital) evidence is carried out according to the general rules for assessing evidence, regulated by the criminal procedure law. At the same time, the courts often do not take into account the electronic (digital) nature of the type of evidence under consideration, which sometimes leads to an erroneous criminal legal qualification of the act or to other incorrect conclusions in the final procedural decision. Scientific comprehension of a new source of information in the system of normatively established evidence is in its active phase (and is still far from completion). However, this analysis of theoretical views and law enforcement, primarily judicial, practice makes it possible to put forward proposals for a phased reform of the criminal procedural law and adjusting law enforcement on the basis of obvious and the features of electronic (digital) evidence, which do not cause fundamental objections, concerning their essence, the specifics of collection, verification and evaluation. The paper focuses on such an element of establishment of evidence as evidence assessment, since, due to the fact that it is less formalized, the courts quite often make mistakes when assessing the relevance, admissibility and reliability of electronic (digital) evidence.

The paper is devoted to an important problem of legal certainty in the Russian criminal procedural law and the criminal procedural activity regulated by it in modern conditions. These are characterized, among other things, by the development of digital technologies, in the context of improving the legal (procedural) and organizational aspects of pre-trial and judicial proceedings. The author conducts an analysis of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, which considers the principle of legal certainty as inherent in the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and as one of the fundamental manifestations of the rule of law. The author studies legal positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation showing that legal uncertainty leads to arbitrariness; the principle of legal certainty is generally recognized and general legal; the need to ensure the operation of the analyzed principle in the Russian legal system follows from the international obligations of the Russian Federation. It is emphasized that both legal norms and law enforcement practice must meet the principle of legal certainty. Given the legal nature of criminal proceedings, objectively characterized by the possibility of restricting the rights and legitimate interests of individuals and legal entities, the widespread use of measures of state coercion, the author, in order to increase the efficiency of the activities of the participants in criminal proceedings endowed with powers of authority and the guarantee of the rights and legitimate interests of other participants in criminal proceedings, proposes to make additions to Art. 1 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation as the first step towards solving the problems of legal certainty of pre-trial and judicial proceedings in criminal proceedings.

The paper highlights the current state of the theory and practice of forensic handwriting analysis of signatures, main provisions and definitions. Topical issues of the study of signatures as a kind of small volume handwriting objects are considered. The problems of the study of a signature produced by using high-tech devices, i.e. plotters, or draft machines, are touched upon. The authors carry out an analysis of such objects taking into account the pressure characteristics of the signature, the differentiation of the original signature and its imitation. The problems of the study of signatures made with the help of copiers and the ways of their solution are considered. Some topical problems of the theory and practice of forensic handwriting examination are presented, the need to adapt the theoretical provisions of certain private methods to modern handwriting objects is indicated. In addition, the paper deals with the use of special knowledge of experts in the field of forensic handwriting studies and technical and forensic examination of documents.

Crimes committed in the field of food security are the subject of research in various legal sciences, including the forensic science. Despite the fact that such crimes are well known around the world, there is a lack of scientific research devoted to them, especially with a forensic focus. The author analyzes the academic literature on food security crimes, developed in several disciplines (criminal law, criminology, forensic science), and concludes that there is no scientific classification of the considered group of crimes from a forensic point of view. The paper outlines the author’s forensic classification of crimes in the field of food security, briefly describes the grounds for such a classification, and provides a definition of crimes in the field of food security as an object of forensic research.

The paper analyzes the provisions of the legislation and the latest court practice of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) regulating the procedure for refusing to issue Schengen visas and other migration permits necessary for foreign scientists to participate in experiments using unique European mega-science facilities, as well as in other scientific events in the EU. The first section "Visa refusal and the right to appeal it in the EU: Historical and comparative legal aspects" examines the formation and initial content of the EU rules on the rationale and appeal of the refusal of Schengen visas, starting with the Schengen agreements of the 1980s and before the adoption of the 2009 EU Visa Code. The second section "Right to appeal against refusal of Schengen and equivalent visas" is devoted to the rules of the 2009 EU Visa Code regarding visas for short-term stays (up to 90 days within a period of 180 days), amended and supplemented by the 2017 EU Court of Justice prejudicial decision as in the case of "El Hassani" regarding the recognition of foreigners’ right to judicial appeal against a visa refusal and, in a broader context, "the right to a fair and adequate consideration of their application" for a visa. The subject of the third, final section "The right to appeal the refusal of visas for long-term stay and residence permits" are the provisions of the latest ECJ court practice (judgment in the case of "M.A." of 10.03.2021), which made it possible to challenge in the courts of the EU Member States refusals to issue even those migration permits that are issued in accordance with national law.

Forest legislation plays a significant role in ensuring sustainable development, since the forest area occupies more than half of the country’s territory. Despite the constant improvement of forestry legislation, the number of problems in the forestry sector does not decrease. Thus, it is not possible to reduce the number of forest fires that occur annually, or the area of forests that die from harmful microorganisms. The paper presents the factors that led to the emergence of systemic problems in the development of the forestry complex, regulation and management in the field of forestry and related relations. The general concept of sustainable development is interpreted ambiguously in regulations and literature. By the early 1990s the number of definitions of sustainable development began to reach several dozen, and since then has increased even more. The paper attempts to develop the author’s concept of sustainable development in forestry legislation, analyzes the latest regulatory legal acts, identifies directions for ensuring sustainable development by forestry legislation, and draws conclusions on the research topic.

The paper discusses certain issues related to the legal regulation of relations arising in the creation and operation of hydraulic structures as an element of water management systems. The relevance of the topic raised is due to the significant impact on the water body of any hydraulic structure created for the use of water resources. The paper shows the legal nature of the relationship between a hydraulic structure and a water body and the ways of reflecting this relationship in the rules of law governing relations on the use and protection of waters; the legal regime for the protection of hydraulic structures from the negative consequences of improper operation is studied. Based on an analysis of the current Russian legislation, the author concludes that there is a differentiated approach to the legal regulation of the relations in question. The provisions of water legislation and legislation on environmental protection are applied to a hydraulic structure as part of a water management system that affects a water body. To a technically complex object, the improper operation of which potentially poses a threat to human life, different provisions are applied, namely the provisions of legislation and a number of regulatory and technical safety acts.

The paper attempts to comprehend the place and role of moot courts in modern legal education. To achieve this goal, the concept and types of moot courts are considered. The author analyses the order of their organization and conduct as a business game in the course of studying an academic discipline (module) and as a competition (competition) among students of higher educational institutions. The main stages of preparing the team for participation in the modeling process are characterized. The author argues an opinion that there are significant advantages of using moot courts in legal education, and supports it with, apart from other things, the results of the author’s survey of students of Kutafin Moscow State University (MSAL) having taken part in different moot court competitions. The author also identifies some difficulties in the preparation of teams. The author concludes that moot courts have an important role in the training of highly qualified specialists to make them ready to solve complex legal issues and possess all the knowledge and skills necessary for this.

The paper provides an overview of the scientific and practical seminar "Legal Writing, Design and Aesthetics in Legal Education" held on April 10, 2021 within the framework of the 8th Moscow Legal Forum at Kutafin Moscow State Law University (MSAL). The paper summarizes the speeches of the participants. The importance of legal design at the present stage of legal education development is emphasized. It is concluded that legal design helps to improve this form with regard to maximum respect and attention to the person, which is the essence of design thinking. Legal design is not about embellishing documents and is not intended to make the document catchy or unusual. Primary in relation to legal design is legal writing, the skills that all students must be taught. It is noted that at MSAL within the framework of a strategic academic unit specially created as part of the Department of Business and Corporate Law (MSAL) a soft skills training program is to be introduced starting from the 2021/2022 academic year. There, in the form of a master class practicing lawyers will teach students the skills of writing and negotiating, judicial rhetoric, and the basics of personal brand development.