Culture of law and the common good

With a focus on integrative legal understanding, the author analyzes the concept “culture of law”, its composition and its relation to the notion of the common good. The content and procedural components of the latter are defined. In determining the common good, it is necessary to unite meaningful (through key social values and notions of justice) and procedural components, it is achieved in conditions of dialogic democracies. Since there is no procedural component in an authoritarian society (real, not fictitious), it is impossible to establish the conformity of state-power decisions to the common good. Following S.S. Alekseev, the concept of culture of law includes the ideas and provisions of modern constitutionalism, the recognition of the direct legal significance of human rights and freedoms, as well as the inviolability of certain legal realities, i.e. actually formed legal conditions. As a result, the author concludes that the ratio of these concepts is complex, but in all cases, the common good should correspond to the unity of the elements of the concept of culture of law. At the same time, the internal hierarchy of the latter is based on the inviolability of the provisions of modern constitutionalism, expressing the ideas of the rule-of-law state, democratic values, dignity and human rights and the need for the normative force to correspond to the first two components of culture of law.