THE AMALFI CODE (TABULA AMALFITANA): PUBLIC LAW PROVISIONS OF PRIVATE LAW ORIGIN

Introduction: the category of ‘purpose in law’ is one of the fundamental and most significant categories in jurisprudence, it is studied in order to increase the effectiveness of legal regulation and strengthen the legal foundations of all spheres of the life of society and the state. In the modern era, the needs of informational society require that purposes should comply with the laws of the society’s functioning, be economically justified, achievable, and necessary for ensuring the security of individuals, society, and the state. Without a proper understanding of the problem of purpose in the theory of law, it seems barely possible to improve the life of society in its different spheres, to improve substantive and procedural legislation, to establish the proper order in the legal process, and to resolve the issue of the relationship between legality and expediency. Purpose: to clarify the place, role, essence of the purpose in law, to formulate some theoretical and methodological foundations of research on this subject. Methods: the basic principles, laws, and categories of idealistic and materialistic dialectics of cognition; general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, historical method, system-and-structural approach); special scientific methods (formal-legal and comparative law methods). Results: we studied the purpose in law with the use of polyvariant analysis, which included philosophical, psychological, political (managerial), legal approaches. The purpose in law is an ideal legal state, based on socially significant values and guaranteed by the state, which the subjects of legal activity strive to achieve. In general legal regulation, there are distinguished dialectically interconnected purposes and purposes-means: a purpose-means of lawmaking activity (a legal rule, i.e. a model of lawful behavior of subjects); an intermediate purpose-means (lawful behavior of subjects); a purpose-ideal of a lawmaking body (the legal state of social relations), which further acts as a means to achieve the global purposes of the international community.