Some Aspects of Application of Leon Petrażycki’s Socio-Philosophical Ideas in the Field of Legal Education

The relevance of the research is determined by the need to find solid foundations rooted in Russian intellectual culture for organizing a system of legal education that would meet the internal needs of Russians. To this end, the key provisions of Leon Petrażycki’s Legal Policy (Civilpolitik) are evaluated by methods of a critical interpretation of sources and comparative analysis. Petrażycki is the founder of Russian legal realism, a striking phenomenon of world legal thought in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, which had a significant impact on the philosophy and sociology of law in Europe and the United States. In particular, it is showed that for Petrażycki’s Legal Policy legal education is not only a tool for ensuring the stability of society and the connectivity of individuals within a social group and between different social groups, but also represents an objective process of legal norms’ impact on the collective and individual psyche, which results in legal reality. It models how the Legal Policy axioms of love and moral progress, as well as the methods of legal deduction and induction can be applied for improvement of legal education today. At the same time, the shortcomings of Legal Policy are revealed and ways of correcting them are proposed by referring to the ideas of followers of Petrażycki - Pitirim Sorokin and Boris Vysheslavtsev. Thus, it is shown that Petrażycki’s legal pedagogy, which does not take into account the significant motivational impact of unconscious psyche contents on the behavior of individuals and the masses, can be supplemented by Vysheslavtsev’s Psychagogy, which considers these factors. In addition, it substantiates why Psychagogy has a good heuristic potential for solving the main task of Legal Policy - the improving current legislation. It is demonstrated that the methods of empirical verification of the effectiveness of legal education proposed by Petrażycki, which have desperately found their way into the practice of law enforcement monitoring in the Russian Federation, can be specified and supplemented by applying the six criteria of the moral and legal thermometer proposed by Sorokin.