Court Practice in Family Disputes: Problems of Discretion on the Verge of Law-Making

The article is devoted to the analysis of the problems connected with the law-making function of court practice in family disputes. The history of this function, which is not one of the classic types of judicial activity, has several factors: paticularities of family legal relations, situational nature of the majority of family law norms as a key prerequisite for broad judicial discretion in its various forms — concretization, interpretation, subsidiary application of the legislation, application of analogy, conflict resolution that in some cases can be qualified as legal stances of normative type. As an illustration, the provisions of a number of current rulings of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on family matters are offered. It is noted that the purpose of the rule-making approaches applied in the court practice involve primarily considerations of fairness in relation to expediency. At the same time, firstly, the criteria for choosing situations for the formation of a trend towards a fair resolution of family disputes of a certain category are not quite clear; secondly, the legal approaches under consideration do not exclude a direct conflict with the family law; thirdly, they remain in the status of recommendations for decades instead of being modified within a reasonable time and transformed into an improved family legislation. The author associates himself with the scholars who consider it necessary, if judicial law-making is inevitable, to regulate its grounds, criteria and procedure directly via civil procedural and/or other laws.