The Correlation of Legality and Justice: Relevant Issues of History and Theory

The work examines in a historical and theoretical vein the issues of the relationship between legality and justice as basic legal categories, which are reflected in the concept of human and civil rights and freedoms. The basic points of view on these problems are revealed. It is noted that the antinomy of the problem under consideration is that not everything that is fair is also legal, and not everything that is legal is fair. Legality and justice should be considered as a dialectical relationship between two fundamental legal principles, and not phenomena of a different order. According to the author of the work, when considering the relationship between legality and justice at the level of entities, there is reason to assert that they can be characterized as one-order phenomena that have interdependence and mutual influence as fundamental ideas in the system of legal regulation, but at the level of phenomena one can state their obvious inconsistency. It is proposed to develop further development of scientific research and improvement of law enforcement practice in methodological terms on the basis of the principle of “Hume’s Guillotine” and the theory of social justice of John Rawls.