Legal identity: structuring the meaningful space

Abstract

The article substantiates the proposition about the expediency of considering legal identity as a special form of social identity and reveals its essence as a legal category. It was determined that legal identity is determined primarily by individual character, because it is an individual quality of a natural person, which consists in mutual understanding between this person and society, provides the possibility of optimal realization of subjective legal rights and contributes to the prompt implementation of subjective legal obligations, is the basis development of individual legal status and serves as a moral and psychological determinant of the nature of legal behavior of the subject of law. It is emphasized that legal identity is a dynamic category that transforms in the process of legal socialization. The identity of a person in the scientific discourse is mostly interpreted as a dynamic, integral cognitive-motivational formation, and therefore it is a system of defining social constructs of the subject, which is constructed (formed) during life as a result of interaction, social comparison and active construction of social reality. Accordingly, legal identity has a dynamic character, contains a motivational component, is a system of social constructions of an individual as a legal subject and is formed in the process of social and legal interaction of similar and different legal subjects, reflects a moral and psychological comparison of oneself with the surrounding legal reality and is a factor that affects the legal matter of a certain society. Legal identity has an unstable nature and is transformed in the process of legal socialization of a person. Social and legal realities of a person cause changes in his personality, and the increase or, conversely, decrease in the value of law at a certain stage of a person's life is reflected in his essence.