On Some Methodological Approaches in Legal Research (Philosophical, Naturalistic, Positivist Approaches)

The subject of the research is methodological approaches in legal research. The article deals with the problems associated with the analysis of theoretical and research features, the productivity of some methodological approaches in modern legal research, the scope and relative range of their effective application. The result of the article is historiography, description and methodological assessment of such approaches of the scientific research of legal reality as philosophical, naturalistic and positivist. The methods used include dialectics, comparative analysis, systemic approach, generalization, concretization, historical, logical, functional and comparative legal methods. The findings of the study are as follows. The history of the development of legal science is a history that contains the opposition of different approaches to the understanding of social phenomena such as state and law. Particular attention is paid to these discussions due to the fact that belonging to a certain type of legal understanding is based not only on the theoretical preferences of scholars, but also on ideological and political trends. The philosophical approach to law, within the framework of the present study appealing to a greater extent to the concepts of Kant and Hegel, is not aimed at the analysis of specific norms. It is abstract, speculative, as befits philosophy. It replaces detailed regulation with a universal principle, a universal criterion of law. That is why the philosophical approach is applicable to any theory and any system of law. For all its abstractness, the philosophical approach to law is important for the legislator, for the practicing lawyer, and for any citizen. It, correlated with the ideological component of national development, is the basis of legislation and the application of law, it is indispensable in the assessment, interpretation and improvement of legal norms. As Kant wrote, "the concept of law is a pure but practical concept". The task of the philosophical approach is to identify the fundamental speculative categorical structures, which, acquiring the quality of ideological attitudes, become able to be the basis of legal regulation. Law, based on the naturalistic approach, which is reflected in the legal doctrine of an individual state in the special historical periods of ideological transformation, turns into one of the sections of sociology today, and legal knowledge becomes a kind of sociological, psychological, political or other social knowledge. This factor can be considered both in a negative and in a positive way, since, on the one hand, the specification of legal studies and their special methods of cognition of legal reality is lost, and, on the other hand, the possibility of using universal theoretical and philosophical tools, often quite effective, appears. The positivist method of studying law is primarily due to the formal-logical study of legal texts. Knowledge of positive law is carried out on the basis of strictly legal criteria, excluding, for the benefit of "sterilization" of the subject area of jurisprudence, the moral component of the law, as well as the presence of socio-political features. Legal positivism embodies clarity, rigor, evidence of law. According to the representatives of positivism, the purpose of legal science is to consolidate the entire volume of continuously changing and growing legislation, identify and eliminate conflicts in the law. The cognitive orientation of a scholar, combining both critical and self-critical analysis of scientific achievements, seems productive, which, in turn, is due to the amount of knowledge about the quantity and quality of existing methodological approaches in legal research.

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