Legal Security of the Russian Federation: Problems of Understanding and Assessment of Modern Threats

The subject of the research in the framework of this article is legal security as one of the fields of the national security of Russia. The author of the article analyzes various approaches to understanding of legal security in the modern legal science. The author equally concludes that legal security can be understood in two aspects: axiological and instrumental. The author points out that the supporters of the axiological approach, basing their statements on the values of law, determine legal security as the state of immunity of the legal system itself from different threats. Whereas the supporters of the instrumental approach argue that the law should have the essential role in providing security of the personality, the society and the State. It is underlined that using different approaches, however, one can distinguish general intrinsic characteristics of legal security. While considering the threats to legal security, the author considers its classical division into internal and external. The following negative phenomena are described as the main internal threats: enactment of regulatory legal acts that violate the norms of the Constitution of the Russian Federation; lacunae and contradictions in the legislation; failure to enact the decisions of Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation; nihilistic attitude to law. The author indicates crisis phenomena in the socio-political life of the country that have a negative impact on law making and law-enforcement. The author of the article concludes that, nowadays, the main threat to legal security in Russia is the low quality of the modern legislation that is manifested in its abundance, situation-specifics, contradictions and technical imperfection.