Diptych. Part 1. Interpretation of law: a method of preventing or a cause of conflicts?

The purpose of the study is to determine the role of interpretation for subsequent law enforcement and whether it is exclusively a means of preventing legal conflicts. The paper presents the author’s understanding of the essence of a legal conflict. The classical approach to understanding a legal conflict is criticized, within the framework of which researchers associate it exclusively with the contradiction of legal norms. The empirical basis is judicial practice, with the help of which it is shown that the interpretation of legal norms by judges does not always help to eliminate the existing conflict, but can give rise to them. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the study of the interpretation of law as a cause of legal conflict. As a result of the analysis of judicial practice, it was revealed that the absence in Russian legislation of a provision defining a court decision as a form of law gives rise to problems associated with the impossibility of creating a unified law enforcement practice caused by differences in the interpretation of law. Law enforcement practice, in which judges are not bound by each other’s decisions, on the one hand, provides an opportunity for personal interpretation and making a fairer decision, on the other hand, the ambiguity of decisions on similar cases can lead to the impossibility of establishing the meaning of the legal norm.