S. S. Alekseev on General Permissions and General Prohibitions in Law

Alekseev’s work “General Permissions and General Prohibitions in Soviet Law” (1989) is a continuation of his previously published work “The Structure of Soviet Law” (1975). General Permissions (GPe) and General Prohibitions (GPr) – the general regulatory principles of law – decisively influence the content and structure of law, the entire legal system and represent a phenomenon that lies in the deep foundations of sociality and regulatory culture. GPe and GPr are autonomous, special substantive legal phenomena, which belong to the deep-seated layer of the legal regulation mechanism. The scientist distinguishes between two types of permissions: power-imperative and autonomous. The level of freedom in society is determined by the limitation of the former and the protection of the latter. The real indicator of the nature of the social order was and remains the answer to the question: who, which subjects and to what extent have legal rights expressing these two types of permissions? The legal specificity of the emerging legal regulation is manifested in permissions and subjective rights. The scope of general permissions and subjective rights is contingent upon the nature of the political regime. Freedom of behaviour is considered as the primary meaning of the term “law”. Law is aimed at the regulation of social relations, which, including in the case of the GPr, is related to subjective rights: law is law because it speaks of rights, because it is the embodiment of the legal freedom of behaviour of participants in social relations. Instead of a prescriptive and prohibitive orientation, law and its understanding in science should be oriented towards the establishment of a humanistically (rather than bureaucratically) organized regulatory system in which subjective rights are the central point. The analyzed work shows that the foundation of the humanistic conception of law, comprehensively developed by the scientist later, was laid in the Soviet period of his work.