To construe cannot be to interpret

Introduction: it is necessary to analyze the existing trend in the legal literature to increase the distance between the main ways of understanding the meaning of law in the direction of the obvious “diminution” of the role of construction of law and expanding the scope of the use of the concept of interpretation. The purpose of the study is to determine the correlation of the concepts “construction” and “interpretation” used in modern Russian law. The objectives of the study are to formulate a number of conceptual problems: “construction”, “interpretation”, “concretization”, “meaning”, “meaning of law”, as well as to reveal the cultural, historical and linguistic origins of the concepts “construction” and “interpretation”. Methods: the article uses formal-legal, concrete-sociological and comparative law research methods. Results: the author proceeds from the etymology of the Russian word “construction” as understanding, reasonable understanding, the explanation of something already available. In this regard, interpretation in the domestic law is a creative moment of the process of construction of law, expressing the dynamism of the interpreter’s thinking or the result of the correlation of the text and the meaning of the rule in the process of construction of law in volume. In contrast to the importance attached to these phenomena in foreign studies, the creation of a new meaning of the legal norm is not “interpretation”, but a more complex legal phenomenon - “meaning formation”. Conclusions: in summary, the author concludes that the distinction between the terms “construction” and “interpretation” is permissible only conditionally depending on different levels of conceptualization of the problem of the meaning of law: at the level of the problem of legal consciousness - the interpretation of law as its doctrinal construction, and at the level of the legislation and legal practice - construction (interpretation) to the extent of their confusion (identification), but not as a replacement of “construction” by “interpretation”. In the context of modern global processes of the XXI century, the construction of law is an important tool to maintain the Russian legal identity, to preserve the developments and achievements of the national theory of law, in which the concept of construction has always been and continues to be of a key and fundamental importance.