Abstract: The object of this research is the legal process viewed by the authors as a gradual transition of the national law from one qualitative level onto another that meets the expectations of the majority of population, as well as caters its needs. The subject of this research is the sociocultural nature of legal progress, its organic connection with the various typed of legal consciousness, scientific and ideological doctrines. The main attention is given to reconsideration and clarification of the established within the post-Soviet legal knowledge definitions of legal progress suggested by different scholars. The article formulates the tentative definition of legal progress, its conceptual and sociocultural characteristics; determines the basic principles of its ambiguous and complicated phenomenon; as well as indicated the approaches to its typification. The scientific novelty consists in formulation of an original definition of “legal progress”, reflecting its conceptual aspects and inevitable sociocultural and doctrinal-strategic “reference”. The authors demonstrate that there is not and cannot be a universal discourse of legal progress, because this phenomenon must be understood and assessed exceptionally in the situational-historical and legal-cultural aspect, detecting the compliance of the achieved results in evolution of the branches of law, its institutions and legislation with the established due to multiple factors social expectations, needs and legal values of certain nation or ethnos. Such position of the authors is reinforced by the necessary theoretical, methodological and historical-legal arguments.