Sources of civil procedural law in pre-revolutionary Russia

The subject of the research of the article includes: - legislative acts that had regulated the civil proceedings in Russia until the revolution of 1917; - the ideas of Russian scientists of the pre-revolutionary period concerning the conception of the sources of Russian civil procedural law and the structure of its system. The research solves several tasks: - it defines the structure of the system of the sources of Russian civil procedural law and the level of development of the procedural legislation of each stage of the evolution of the proceedings in the pre-revolutionary Russia; - it gives a critical analysis of the interpretations of the scientific category "source of law" that had existed in Russian pre-revolutionary juridical science; - it defines the place and the significance of such sources of civil procedural law as the legal custom and the court precedent during different stages of development of Russian jurisdiction. The methodological basis of the research is the dialectical method that presumes omni-tude, objectivity and the interconnection of the phenomena under analysis. The author also used such methods as system-oriented analysis, comparative research, formal logical and historical-legal analysis, formal legal method and the method of legal comparison, and the etatism version of the method of legal positivism. The empirical basis of the work includes the texts of the legislative acts of the period under review, in particular the Court Statutes of the Russian Empire, 1864. It also includes the works of such scholars of civil procedural law as E.V. Vaskovskiy, G.F. Shershenevich, T.M. Yablochkov and others, published before the revolution of 1917. The author formulates the following conclusions: In the pre-Petrine Russia the court precedent and the legal custom were parts of the system of the sources of the procedural law as well as the legislative acts. Historically the first form of law was the court precedent. In Petrine Russia the idea of the power of the state as the only legitimate source of law became clearly formulated. The sources of law in the meaning of the law-creating force were the legislative acts. After the reform of the court proceedings in 1864, the obligatory resolutions of the judges and the Ministry of Justice formed part of the system of the sources of law in Russia, although the applicable legislation remained to be the main source of law. The legal custom and the judicial practice were the additional sources of law. The role of the judicial practice was similar to the role of the acts of interpretation of law produced by the highest judicial bodies of the Russian Federation nowadays. By the end of the XIX century, the system of Russian civil procedural law had acquired a sustainable form, very similar to the modern one. The applicable Russian civil procedural legislation includes the Statute of Civil Legal Proceedings among its sources (in the meaning of the resource of adoption and materials used as its basis).

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