Views of Pre-Revolutionary Russian Civil Scientists on the Problems of the Development of Civil Legislation in the Russian Empire

Relevance. The ongoing reform of the legal system in the Russian Federation also affects the sphere of civil legislation. There is a pluralism of opinions in the civil law doctrine regarding the further structuring of the legal system, in particular, the expediency of separating the branches of business law and commercial law. Being the most extensive and requiring significant intellectual and time resources form of systematization of normative legal acts, the process of codification is accompanied by certain difficulties at each historical stage of the development of the state. For example, the discussion about the feasibility of separate codification of commercial and civil legislation existed among representatives of legal science in the middle of the XIX century and remains relevant to this day. Also, the problem of the extension of the Civil Code of the late XIX-early XX centuries. the entire territory of the multinational state was relevant for the pre-revolutionary legal system.
The purpose of the article is to study the views of pre-revolutionary civil scientists on the problems of the development of civil legislation in the Russian Empire.
The objectives of the research are the analysis of pre-revolutionary monographic and periodical sources, as well as the disclosure of the main problematic issues in the development of systematization and structuring of prerevolutionary civil legislation.
Methodology. Dialectical, historical, and comparative-legal methods are used as the methodological basis of the study.
Results of the study allowed us to draw certain conclusions about the orientation of the views of prerevolutionary civil scientists on the problems of the development of civil legislation in the Russian Empire.
Conclusion. The author managed to establish that 1) regarding the areas of codification activity in the period under study, two main points of view emerged, according to which it would be possible to create a single unified act, or to conduct a separate codification of the norms of civil legislation in the center and outskirts of the Russian Empire (V. D. Spasovich, N. A. Tur); 2) regarding the problem of structuring the civil law branch, the researchers ' positions were also divided into 2 points of view, namely: the need for separate codification of commercial and civil law (V. N. Leshkov, N. A. Tur, O. Ya. Parchment, P. P. Tsitovich), and the inclusion of commercial law in the sphere of legislative regulation of civil law (V. D. Spasovich).

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