Legal Collisions: Russian Scientific Discourse

Abstract

This article focuses on various approaches to the concept of legal collisions in the Russian legal science. Collisions first appeared in the Russian legal literature at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. They were described as a clash or conflict of laws within the framework of private international law. Scientists developed a typology of legal collisions and linked them to living conditions in an attempt to consider the problem from sociological perspectives. Soviet researches studied legal collisions as part of private international and domestic law. In the 1960s, they declared the objective inevitability of legal collisions. Some major works on legal collisions were published in the 1970–1980s. Their authors chose legal positivism and considered a legal collision to be a divergence of legal or legislative norms. In the 1990s, legal collisions were determined as a discrepancy between an actual social attitude and its normative regulation, i.e., as a certain contradiction of claims or interests.