The Concept and Content of Regulatory Prescription in the Special Part of Criminal Law

The questions of the internal structure and system of the special part of criminal law remain relevant in spite of a large number of scientific works on this topic. One of the complicated theoretical questions is the characteristics of the initial element of the branch of law’s system in criminal law. Scholars suggest using either the legal norm or the regulatory prescription as such an element. The discussion of their correlation is of much significance within the framework of the positivist theory of law. The author supports the ideas of the logical model of correlation between the norm and the prescription and claims that the criminal law norm, as a holistic rule of behavior determining the rights and liabilities of the participants of criminal law relations, consists of several regulatory prescriptions. From this position, the norm is a logical form of expressing some aggregate of regulatory legal prescriptions. The regulatory prescription of the special part of criminal law is the core determining the contents and structure of the criminal law norm. A significant theoretical issue is the correlation between the regulatory prescription and the text of the criminal law article. Using the logical categories of «concept» and «proposition», the author proves that criminal law prescription of the special part is not to be equated with the text of criminal law because their relationship is that of content and form. The logical form for the expression of a prescription is a separate sentence in the text of the Criminal Code’ Article, a proposition that expresses a complete legislative thought. The contents of the regulatory prescription of the special part of criminal law consist in establishing the grounds and limits of using measures of criminal law reaction against persons who committed crimes. The structure of such prescriptions includes the hypothesis that defines characteristic features of specific crimes, and the disposition that described the degree to which the state is free to decide on the choice of the type and amount of punishment that can be imposed on the guilty person. In order to observe the constitutional rules of formulating the criminal law prohibition and ensuring the logical norms of their expression in the text of the law, the author proves the necessity of phasing out the use of simple dispositions and the repetition of the title of the crime in the disposition.