Ovchinnikova A. Phenomenology of Legal Culture: A Philosophical and Legal Research

The thesis is devoted to fundamental philosophical, methodological and legal bases of phenomenological understanding of legal culture. The current dominant approach to understanding the nature and essence of legal culture are explored and mapped, their advantages and disadvantages are shown. Particular attention is paid to the problems of formation of cultural discourse of the law, where the phenomenological issues are of particular importance. Author discovers cultural foundations of application of phenomenology in the study of legal culture. If phenomenology primarily based on the idea of direct sensory experience, reduction of deductive theoretical schemes that oppose to the understanding of things as they are, the legal culture is just a system of concepts that form due to personal or collective experience in the context of social life. On this basis author shows the substantial characteristics of statics and dynamics of a legal culture that is reflected in the collective memory of the law and legal acculturation. Displaying the formation and use of the concepts of legal culture – specific legal notions, which in the cultural context become complicated and multilayer. Author solves literal, passive and active layers of concepts of legal culture. Problems of involvement of legal culture of the legal communication are discovered and their interaction is described.