Public and Private Law: Criteria for Classifying a Branch of Law as a Relevant Subsystem in French Legal Doctrine

Russia’s transition to a legal state and respect for human rights naturally leads to the need to revive and further develop private law, and therefore the idea of dividing law into private and public has become relevant in the Russian legal doctrine. The purpose of the article is to give a brief comparative analysis of the Russian and French legal doctrines on the problem of the composition of the subsystems of the system “public - private law” and, using the example of criminal law, to determine the criteria and arguments, which are used in French literature to classify this and therefore other branches of law as one of the specified subsystems, as well as assess the likelihood of applying such arguments within the framework of Russian legal doctrine. Methodology used: comparative jurisprudence, legal hermeneutics, formal-legal method, some elements of methodological and cultural analysis. It is concluded that the use by French lawyers of arguments unusual for the Russian doctrine shows a different understanding of the composition of the subsystems of public and private law, since completely different criteria consider them more important for classifying a particular branch of law as private law - these are primarily the interests of individuals, and not the amount of state participation in legal relations, even if somewhere it is very large. This approach allows to preserve the “sovereign territory” of private law and its worthy place in the main division of law, what is vital today for the Russian legal system, since the diminishment of private law. As our historical experience has shown, inevitably leads first to the destruction of the individual’s freedom protected by private law and the diminishment of human rights in general, and then to the transformation of public and private law into a pseudo-legal system.