Legal awareness and legal culture, their interconnection and development mechanisms

In every society, at all historical stages of development, the ideals and values of different people collided and sought compromise. The concepts of "fair" and "unfair," "dignified" and "embarrassing," in the end, at the state level, were reflected in terms "lawfully" and "unlawfully."

Proceeding from this, it is possible to isolate two relatively autonomous, but at the same time interrelated concepts - "legal awareness" and "legal culture". At first glance, culture has an advantage over legal awareness, largely determines and determines it. But often we see cases of feedback. It is clear that different people have different values and attitude to social reality. Some deliberately accept and fulfill the requirements of legal norms, and some allow (intentionally or not) deviation from the generally accepted rules of conduct. However, even these offenders have a clear consciousness that they are acting illegally, and that their actions in the eyes of society are reprehensible.

So, we can talk about the presence in society of a legal culture. It develops together with the society, forming value orientations, ideals of justice and influencing the behavior of the majority of its members. For example, in slave-owning society there was no value for the person of the slave, he was treated as a thing and goods, but in later societies the norm of freedom of people was accepted, and now, when we hear about slavery cases, we unconditionally condemn, although in ancient Greece it was generally accepted The norm. There are many more examples of how the legal culture has changed with the development of human civilization. The concept and structure of it also underwent changes.

The code of legal values, ideals and behavioral norms was sometimes formed spontaneously, but often it was influenced by the ruling classes, religious authorities and even charismatic personalities. They to some extent carried away other members of society, forcing them to voluntarily or compulsorily follow these new norms. Thus, the structure of legal culture can be described as follows. First of all, it is a psychological legal culture (for example, it is not good to steal and it's embarrassing to steal). Then follows the behavioral (I will not steal) and, finally, the ideological paradigm (theft is a crime).

The ideological component of the legal culture is reflected in the customs, kutyumah, laws. And already written or unwritten law forms a sense of justice - that form of social consciousness that reflects the law and its application. Thus, the sense of justice and the legal culture are in constant interrelation. Legal awareness through education, education, through well-established laws and norms affects the culture. But the legislative authorities also consist of people who are carriers of certain legal values.

A bunch of "sense of justice and legal culture" is organic and inseparable. They influence each other, and are conditioned by each other. We can say that the first concept is more orderly, because it reflects both the current law, and its history, its best achievements, as well as positive examples of other states. These are systematized ideas and representations about the validity - real or desired. Legal culture is broader than the sense of justice, and carries a large emotional and behavioral component.

Both legal consciousness and legal culture are divided into individual, social group and social. The individual can have values, behavioral attitudes and sense of justice, absolutely not coinciding with the generally accepted. There are social groups in which a completely different attitude to the laws and their perception is formed (not "to earn and buy" but to "steal and drink"), but in general the society marginalizes such individuals and social groups.

However, there are examples where the legal culture of the society simply did not grow to laws borrowed from the best law enforcement practices of other countries. For example, the law on humane treatment of animals, adopted from political motives (for the sake of accession to the European Union), in a society where it is not customary to treat our smaller brothers as a subject of law, will be met with complete disregard and contrary to the law acts.