Pseudo-Blanket Terms in the Russian Criminal Law and Their Impact on Judicial Practice

The relevance of the research presented in this publication is generally due to the significant influence of the language form of the Russian criminal law on its application, which requires a scientifically sound approach to the selection of lexical units when formulating criminal law prescriptions to ensure their accuracy and clarity. Out of a large array of existing problems in this area, we have chosen one, which has not been covered in the scientific literature before, this is the problem of including pseudo-blanket terms in the blanket prescriptions of the Russian criminal law, which creates the impression that the content of a criminal law prescription is dependent on normative legal prescriptions of other sectoral affiliation, while in fact there is no such dependence. The purpose of the publication is to determine the phenomenology of pseudo-blanket terms in the Russian criminal law and to identify their impact on judicial practice. In the process of research, general scientific (induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis, system-structural) and traditional for jurisprudence specific scientific (formal-legal, sociological, historical-legal, comparative-legal) methods of cognition, as well as methods of stylistic, lexical and contextual analysis of the text used in linguistics are applied. As a result of the conducted research, the article formulates the definition of the concept “pseudo-blanket term”, characterizes the linguistic-legal nature of pseudo-blanket terms of the criminal law, identifies their types, establishes the reasons for their occurrence. The article reveals the negative impact of their presence in the Russian criminal law, on the one hand, on the accuracy and clarity of blanket criminal law prescriptions, and on the other hand, on the emerging judicial practice, manifested in the fact that the law enforcer is forced to use pseudo-blanket terms in his decisions, since they can be stated only in the verbal form that is accepted in the criminal law; as a result, phenomena appear in law enforcement acts that do not exist in legal reality. The article offers the author’s recommendations aimed at removing pseudo-blanket terms from the text of the Russian criminal law and preventing their use in the future.