S.S. Alekseyev is a legal thinker: stages of life and creative path

A general overview of the life and creativity of the great Soviet and Russian scientist is given, and two periods in his development are distinguished - early and late, or Soviet and post-Soviet, special legal and philosophical legal, theoretical and practical, reformatory. These stages correspond to two epochs of Russian society. Despite the existence of these two stages, the fundamental grounds of the legal thinker's teaching remained the same throughout his creative life; they are a piety to Law as the most important social value and personal dignity, human rights and freedoms enshrined in Law, which is their “repository. The thinker paid attention to legal education as an essential means of enhancing legal culture of society and ensuring the rule of law in its life. The scientist tried to translate his main ideas - as far as possible - into reality in the Soviet period, but all conditions for this arose only during the restructuring period of our country's development. The peculiarities of Soviet scientific discourse are also considered and the relevance of a number of his ideas for today is shown.