Natural law and positivist approaches to the content of the fundamental principles of civil legislation

The author insists that the issues of legal consciousness remain without due consideration in the modern civil literature. In most cases, it means only the tacit acceptance of the positivist model of civil law that seems to be unreasonable. The article analyses the genesis of natural law and positivist theories in relation to the essence of the civil law and makes conclusion about the objective duality of the studied phenomenon; it also identifies strong and weak points of these theories. The article explains the possibility of applying the natural law theory to the study of some principles of Russian civil legislation (inviolability of property: restoration of violated rights).