The legal nature of professional legal awareness: concept, structure and functions

Professional legal awareness is a complex institution where psychological characteristics of an individual, his experience and theoretical knowledge are combined. Within the framework of professional legal awareness, there is a combination of doctrinal, special-practical and everyday components, which are expressed through the means of legal feelings, habits, knowledge and skills. The ideological component of professional legal awareness depends on the influence of different factors: from cultural and civilizational and intellectual to practical and applied and industry-specific. The paper presents theoretical approaches that reveal the content of the phenomenon of “professional legal awareness". Professional legal awareness is understood as the presence of certain legal knowledge related to the characteristics of professional activity, as well as a deeper knowledge of the normative legal acts that are most closely related to the profession being performed. The author examines the role of professional legal awareness from the standpoint of structural and functional approaches. The characteristic of professional legal awareness in comparison with ordinary and theoretical legal awareness is given, and its features are also listed.