“Civil circulation” as a fundamental category in civil law

Introduction: one of the urgent tasks of the civil law science is developing a new ap-proach to understanding the fundamental civil law categories, comprising the “civil circula-tion” among others. Purpose: to develop the author’s novel approach to the category of civil circulation, which includes the semantic meaning of the “circulation” category, to provide a review of doctrinal approaches to understanding the “civil circulation” term, to define the normative meaning of this term, the objective and subjective composition of the civil circula-tion, and to clarify its content. Methods: the following methods were used: general scientific dialectical method, universal scientific methods (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduc-tion, comparison, abstracting, concrete-historical method, structural functional method, for-mal-logical method, structured system method), specific juridical methods (comparative law method, system interpretation method). Results: civil circulation is distinguished from pro-perty circulation due to the principles that underlie the functioning of civil law relations - permissive rule, equality, autonomy of the will, inviolability of property, and other private law principles. At the same time, in terms of the legal essence, civil circulation, unlike property circulation, represents the circulation of civil rights to objects, and not the circulation of ob-jects themselves. Conclusions: from the perspective of the dogmatic approach, the “civil cir-culation” term can be used mainly in two meanings - narrow and broad ones. In the narrow sense, civil circulation means a complex of cases when the civil right holder changes, whereas in its broad sense, the term also includes other willful acts of regulatory nature.