Historical and Methodological Features of Legality as a General Legal Category

The paper examines some methodological foundations for the study of legality as a historical and legal phenomenon. It is noted that historically the development of ideas about the state and law did not have an identical and synchronous character in various civilizations and eras of human history, which could not but affect the evolution of ideas about both law and legality. The article reveals the problems of the relationship between the historical and the logical within the framework of the study of legality, incl. the question of the moment in time of the emergence of legality in the context of customary law as the primary source of “proto-legality”. It is argued that multilinearity is an immanent vector of the evolution of legality as a general legal phenomenon, reflecting the connection of law with public consciousness in the context of the dynamics of diverse sociocultural systems. The work describes the mechanism of cognition of the patterns of legality and notes that the pattern of development of legality is the establishment of punishment against the offender by the state as a way of ensuring the rule of law, which can be found in almost any fundamental historical legal monument.