A general legal nature of the category of “law and order” is beyond doubt, but its content is rather debatable, and it prevents its active use in branch research. The branch (institutional) approach to this category is extremely rare. When analyzing private issues, the category of law and order is either not mentioned at all, or manifests itself as a “background”, a kind of “legal environment” in which a particular problem exists, while the nature of the relationship between the relevant problem and law and order is not analyzed or disclosed. Insufficient discussion of law and order in branch research is due to the dominance of a narrow approach to this category, while the application of a broad approach can heighten interest in the issue under consideration in the branches of Russian law. The purpose of the study is to determine prospects for using the category of “law and order” in Russian law branches. This purpose determines the need to identify problems and key factors influincing the nature of ideas about law and order, to analyze current approaches to this category, to typologize them; and to substantiate a promising direction of branch research on law and order. The research is methodologically based on a dialectical‑materialistic method of cognition in combination with general legal methods of analysis, synthesis and the private scientific method of dogmatic‑legal analysis. Discreteness of ideas about law and order is manifested in the existence of narrow and broad approaches, which are simultaneously conditioned by both the practice of legislative use of the category and the content of established doctrines. Expanding the practice of using this category in branch research will be possible only if the existing discreteness is overcome. At the same time, the idea of contextuality and multidimensionality of law and order can become a unifying principle, suggesting the analysis of various, but at the same time interrelated forms of its manifestations, combined with the study of features of the sectoral structure of law and order based on comprehensive studies of legislation, the practice of its application, achieved social and legal results of legal regulation.
Evgeny Svinin (Thu,) studied this question.