Public Danger as the Main Feature of a Crime and a Tool for Differentiating Criminal Liability

Relevance. This article deals with the issues of material and formal approaches to the definition of the concept of a crime, which is relevant in connection with the emergence of "administrative-prejudicial clones" in criminal legislation and with legislative initiatives to introduce the concept of " criminal minor offense».
The purpose: to substantiate the need to understand public danger as a fundamental feature of a crime and the basis for the differentiation of crimes and criminal responsibility.
Objectives: to study the history of approaches to the definition of the concept of crime and to correlate them with modern tasks and principles of Russian criminal law; to determine the significance of public danger in domestic criminal law; to analyze the dependence of the differentiation of crimes on the nature and degree of their public danger.
Methodology. The methodological basis of the research was made by the methods of dialectics as a general scientific method of cognition and such private scientific methods as formal legal, comparative legal, historical and logical, the method of legal modeling in their various combinations.
Results. Public danger allows you to distinguish between the concepts of "offense" and "crime", which means that this is a specific criminal-legal feature. He, in turn, is crucial for the division of crimes into categories (in the General part of the criminal code), and the crimes (in the Special part of criminal code).
Conclusion. Public danger is the main feature of a crime and underlies the differentiation of both crimes (general differentiation) and its components (special differentiation).

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