The scope and content of the concepts of "cultural value" and "cultural heritage" in the system of legal categories

The subject of the study is the relationship between the concepts of "cultural heritage" and "cultural values" in the system of legal categories of international and national law. The aim of the work is to establish the ontological foundations and structural differences of these concepts, to define their interrelation, and to justify the necessity of differentiated legal regulation. The methodology of the study is based on a comprehensive application of formal-legal, comparative-legal, and historical-legal methods, supplemented by philosophical-legal analysis and elements of a phenomenological approach to cultural and legal phenomena. As a result of the work, it was proven that the concepts of "cultural heritage" and "cultural values" do not have a genus-species relationship but represent intersecting sets with various temporal structures, subjects of evaluation, and ontological foundations; the evolution of the conceptual content was traced from the property-legal approach of the 1954 Hague Convention through the teleological dimension of the 1972 UNESCO Convention to overcoming the materialistic paradigm in the 2003 Convention; a correlation was established between ontological differences and differentiation of legal regimes. The area of application of the results includes legislative techniques, improvement of legislation in the field of protection of cultural heritage and cultural values, law enforcement practice, and the development of theoretical foundations of legislation of the Russian Federation on culture. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the concept of understanding cultural heritage and cultural values as legal concepts of a special kind, existing between norm and value, between what is and what ought to be, is justified; phenomenological jurisprudence of culture is proposed as a methodological basis for revealing invariant structures of cultural and legal reality. Conclusions: the conceptual dualism of the current legislation, which uses these concepts as interchangeable, requires revision; there is a need to develop an integrative theory of legal concepts in cultural law on a philosophical-legal foundation; the phenomenological approach is capable of overcoming the reductionism of positivism and ensuring adequate legal regulation of cultural and legal phenomena.