The public danger of an act in an intersectoral dimension

Relevance. In the criminal law doctrine, the sign of public danger is defined as fundamental, allowing one to distinguish a crime from other offenses. The increasing complexity of existing legal relations and the unsystematic development of sectoral rule-making call into question this dogmatic judgment. The feasibility of using this characteristic as an unconditional basis for criminalization requires verification. The purpose of the study is to assess the prospects for using the sign of public danger to criminalize an act and distinguish a crime from other offenses. Objectives: study the genesis of the material sign of a crime with the identification of its criminal-political function at the stage of its emergence and in the process of evolution. Methodology. The methodological basis of the study was the universal dialectical method of cognition of phenomena and processes of the surrounding reality. In the course of developing the theoretical provisions of the work, historical-legal, formal-logical, formal-legal, semantic and other methods were also used. Results. Initially, the sign of public danger had a fundamentally different criminal and political meaning. It opened up wide possibilities for applying the law by analogy. The question of distinguishing the criminal from the noncriminal through its use was not raised. Subsequently, the demarcation of protective legislation and attempts to give sectoral uniqueness to criminal law by using a material sign of the social danger of an act did not resolve the issue of the boundaries of criminalization and the limits of the state’s punitive power; on the contrary, the situation worsened. Using examples from practice, based on the judgments of researchers about the essence of the social danger of an act, the authors of the article question the advisability of using this feature as an unconditional basis for the criminalization of an act. Conclusions. Based on the results of the study, the authors come to the conclusion that in the process of criminalization of an act, the focus of attention should be shifted from an idealized sign of social danger to the principles of criminalization: economy of repression, formal certainty, intersectoral consistency and proportionality, as well as the expediency of criminalization (declaring a crime) from the perspective of the possibilities of criminal the right to influence real relationships, transforming them qualitatively.