Legal a wareness as a leading and integral part of legal culture

Introduction: it is of high theoretical and practical importance to determine the correlation of legal awareness and legal culture. It is impossible to create and implement a scientific programme for establishing and developing legal culture in a country without knowing precisely of what the significance of legal awareness is within the structure of legal culture. This problem, however, has not yet been resolved to our satisfaction. Mainly because of the fact that there is no clear scientific definition of legal culture. Purpose: to determine the significance of legal awareness in each of the two representations of legal culture, basing on the author''s original interpretation of "legal culture ". Methods: general materialistic dialectical method is used, as well as systemic-structural, comparative legal, legal dogmatic, and historical legal methods. Results: the analysis of existing definitions of legal culture shows that the approach to such definitions is unilateral. It mostly covers the transitive aspect of legal culture. However, its "intransitive" aspect, which is created by legal entities, is never considered. In our opinion, legal culture is mainly a legal feature of legal entities (both collective and individual). It is the degree of their legal development, legal perfection, level of their ability to effectively create and use the necessary legal means to achieve their lawful goals, interests and needs, and then to implement these abilities in their social and legal activities producing legal values, which are the products of legal culture. This definition of legal culture indicates that it has two representations: transitive and intransitive. In its intransitive representation, legal culture belongs to an individual. It cannot be physically separated from them as it is integrated in their legal psyche and lawful behaviour. The intransitive representation of legal culture is a system which consists of an individual ''s knowledge of their rights, their positive awareness of their rights and social and legal use of those rights. The transitive representation of legal culture consists of material results of legal-cultural activity of legal entities, such as legal acts, statutory acts, enabling legislation, interpretational acts, legal agreements, etc. Conclusions: the aforementioned bilateral structure of legal culture allows us to determine the significance of legal awareness more clearly. Legal awareness is a key element of legal culture. In the intransitive aspect of legal culture, legal awareness makes the first and the second elements of legal culture. In the transitive aspect of legal culture, legal awareness is not fully materialised. It is impossible to materialise its legal psychology. Only a part of legal ideology can be materialised: a legal entity''s legal knowledge that is implemented in the results of any legal-cultural activity.