Legal discretion in criminal law: general theoretic and branch-wise aspects

Saratov State Law Academy, Department of Prosecutor’s Supervision and Criminology, Saratov, Russia

^* Corresponding author: alexnik-82@mail.ru

Abstract

Pre-requisites: legal discretion in criminal law just as in other branches has only partially been a subject matter of legal analysis. Predominantly, a law-enforcement type of discretion was studied, which is implemented by law-enforcement authorities during criminal prosecution. However, modern surveys in the field of law theory consider discretion as a general law phenomenon including law-enforcement, law-making, and law-interpretation aspects. This suggests the need to study legal discretion in criminal law from new points of view. Moreover, one should also take into account a dual-aspect nature of legal discretion, e.g., a combination of characteristics of the subject implementing discretion and law-regulated relations where this takes place. The research objective is to define an opportunity of affecting subjects implementing individual types of legal discretion (law-enforcement, law-making, and law-interpretation) intended for optimization of the discretion level in criminal law. Methods: a combination of common, general scientific, specific scientific, and specific legal methods. First of all, the paper uses a systemic and functional approach. Results. Legal discretion in legal law is represented by law-enforcement, law-making, and law-interpretation discretion of respective subjects. These types of discretion are interdependent and indissolubly related. Currently, an integrated approach to studying these types of discretions in legal law is poorly discussed in literature. Meanwhile, only this approach allows for a systematic study of legal discretion limits (in general and for individual types) and for adequate evaluation of their efficiency in criminal law.