Law of the 20th and 21st Centuries: Continuity and Novelty

The paper is devoted to the issues of conceptualization of legal development in the 20th and 21st centuries. The paper investigates social relations that determined the global law evolution in the 20th century, as well as changes in macroregulation in the first quarter of the century under consideration. The subject matter of the analysis covers theoretical understanding of the development vectors in the essence of law at the turn of the last two centuries. As a scientific hypothesis, the author puts forward the statement regarding regulatory specificity and a special strategic role of the 20th century for subsequent legal development. Proving this hypothesis, the author structures the directions of global transformation of social essence and social interrelations of law in the preceding period. The author also shows that these changes have led to the rise of a systemic postclassical legal tradition. The author has described its characteristics and the role in the formation of a new legal identity of the 21st century. The paper also examines the signs of novelty of the law of the present century. The author determines the features of its regulatory individuality generated by technological changes. It is concluded that the novelty of the law of the present century is preconditioned by the combination of Postmodern and the era of introduction of technological regulators. The paper shows the directions of formation of regulatory individuality of the 21st century, its contradictions related to the legal adaptation of a new technological order. It is concluded that the legal regulation moves towards inclusion patterns of nature and new biological and virtual states of the man in its immediate subject matter. The legal complex integrates the methodology of technology and the artificial language of technology, which results in providing a significant insight into the boundaries of social and technical norms. The paper questions the possible rupture of the legal tradition, which the 21st century is bringing, the factors of its aggravation, including the pandemic. The assumption is formulated that a new law arises in the system of innovative interrelations in the technological sphere that leads to the restructuring of institutions of law and legal relations, as well as to the formation of new value properties of law—its syncreticism, integration of the individual and the general, non-subjectivity, non-objectivity, public-private permeability, anthropomorphism.