Legal artefacts and the cultural code of law

Mykhailo Ryazanov
1970 Law Review of Kyiv University of Law  
Updating issues related to the issue of legal heritage, its constituents, its place and role in the development of law, directly related to the phenomenon of the cultural code of law and legal mentality. The legal heritage focuses on a special set of inside information that fills the content of modern legal life in its statics and dynamics. The idea of a legal culture is considered as an expression of one form of meaningful activity of people, which is to achieve a certain purpose. An example
more » ... the refraction of individual facts, knowledge, skills, which form the image of law in a person, which in the process of conscious interpretation and systematic repetition of the same practices, form legal experience, which is transformed into a higher form of assessment of legal facts, phenomena, events. Representing the basis of legal culture - the cultural code of law is a semiotic "matrix" of vital content, concentrated in the legal heritage, which in the process of professional lawyers activity will be filtered, the new will "erase" the previous, or adapt it to current conditions and broadcast into the future. For the legal culture, it is significant the correlation between codes (signaling) and how they are used (communication). In this context, the codes or the contents contained therein perform a signifying function, that is, a designation of legal phenomena. This happens with the rules of law, legal institutions, legal myths, rituals, any legal artifacts, the significance of which performs the inherent function of preserving and transmitting legal information to the addressee (social subject), and he perceives it, interpreting in their own actions and actions that are also significant to other participants in the legal relationship. The transmission of accumulated legal information is ensured by existence of the legal memory. Legal memory is a social-legal mechanism for updating content and values that are interpreted within a specific legal space and time. Here, legal memory is not perceived as an abstract concept, but as a system of content embedded in legal artifacts. Due to them, it is realized the connection of times. They (artifacts) become a kind of memory storage, both direct and indirect, which is read through contextual connections with other artifacts. In this way, the whole legal sphere can be regarded as an independent, single text of the legal content contained in the legal artifacts, which is united by the common cultural code and as a set of elements of the legal culture with its inherent set of codes.
doi:10.36695/2219-5521.4.2019.06 fatcat:7daeutxb45hjbm5i3ml4fpzucu