Dynamic Understanding of Law: the Attempt of Historical Explication

The following article is about the main trends of understanding of lawin the former Soviet Union. These trends are the so-called "classical" and "non-classical" ("post-classical") understanding of law. At the same, time non-classical legal philosophy in the former Soviet Union doesn’t take the ideas from the Western thoughtuncritically but tries to elaborate its own view to the legal field. The specificity of thenamed view may be characterized by the concept of "dynamic understanding of law".The similar concept is the common title for the wide range of the doctrines, whichwere elaborated in the Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia on the edge of the centuries.These are, for example, the phenomenological-communicative approach of A.V. Polyakov, the doctrine of the legal dialogue of I.L. Chestnov, the temporal-ontological philosophy of law (A.V. Stovba), the conception of legal reality (S.I. Maksymov) and so on.It’s worth to stress, that all the named legal doctrines are independent from one another and original. But at the same time, it has common features, which allow us to significate it under the common title "dynamic understanding of law". The similar featuresare the next: negative position towards the reification of law, to the attempts to consider law in the frame of subject-object relations, to the representation of law as thestatic, continual "Ought", which regulates its object — "Is" — from the "secure" transcendental distance. Instead of this the named legal philosophers propose to consider law as dynamic (discrete and reproduced) in its core phenomenon, which originallyhas social roots and character. At the same time despite the originality of similar viewsto the law, we can find its historical parallels in the Middle Ages, in the sagas of AncientIceland. The conclusion is that the ideas of the dynamic understanding of law are anadequate conceptual approach to the general reasoning of the legal essence.