Primary basic criminal law categories: crime, punishment

The subject of the study: criminal law categories. The issue of criteria for classifying a certain criminal law term into a category remains problematic and debatable. The purpose of the study: to identify the primary basic criminal law categories, to substantiate their features. Research methods: due to the specifics of the study, the methods of system-structural and functional analysis are used as the main ones. as a methodological basis for the study. The dialectical method of cognition of socio-legal phenomena is used, as well as general scientific methods of cognition (analysis, synthesis), private scientific (formal logical, epistemological). The main results of the study: the primary basic criminal law categories are crime and punishment. The category of criminal liability is a secondary criminal law category, since it is derived from the primary legal category of legal liability. The author formulates the signs that characterize the criminal law category.