Science of law and challenges of external environment: from national past to collision with paradigms of globalization

Introduction: the article deals with the development and the paradigm shift of the science of law at the present stage. It provides a comparative and historical analysis of the factors influencing the development of jurisprudence. The research is based on the principles of methodological pluralism and takes into account the civilizational understanding of regional development and globalization trends. The article also analyzes the challenges existing in the present-day legal reality - legal regulation of genome research and digitization of social reality. The purpose of this research is a retrospective analysis of the science of law development in the Continental European, the Anglo-Saxon and the religious-doctrine-based legal communities. Special attention is given to the issues related to the influence of globalization on the present-day science of law in different countries. Both general and special methods of inquiry were used in course of work on this article. Formulation of the doctrinal approaches to the issues covered by the article would be impossible without a comparative analysis performed within the framework of interdisciplinary (comparison of the legal doctrine with the related spheres of knowledge, such as philosophy and sociology), cross-branch (comparative analysis of approaches used in comparative law, philosophy and the theory of law and legal disciplines), cross-border (comparison of different national legal systems with each other and with the provisions of international law) as well as chronological (historical comparative analysis) approaches. The sociological method and the method of legal modeling were used to identify the social foundations of the science of law evolution in global practice. The result of the research is a multidimensional doctrinal picture of the peculiarities of jurisprudence development in the countries of the Continental European, the Anglo-Saxon and the religious-doctrine-based legal communities. In course of the research, the authors came to the following key conclusions: 1) Before the era of globalization, the evolution of the science of law was directly linked to local communities. 2) The end of the ‘Neolithic Age’ for the global science of law has given rise to a whole set of problems associated with legal regulation: - competition between the international mechanisms intended for protection of the participants of social relations with national institutions; - clash of different legal traditions in regulation of homogeneous groups of social relations; - general tendency for national legal systems to lose their legal sovereignty in a number of social areas; - formation of a hegemonic manifestation of social relations under the influence of a seemingly universal global world model and legal framework; - emergence of numerous zones of subsequent ‘gaps in law’ under the influence of globalization-related processes. 3) The key issue to be considered in this regard should be a discussion about the international essence of the science of law not only in the comparative and integration law segments.