Lafitsky V.I. Comparative Law Dimension of Time and Space

Abstract: The article is devoted to comparative law dimension of time and space as fundamental categories of law. Initially, from the birth of law, they were acknowledged as its immanent attributes determining its temporal and spatial limits. Proving this, the author analyses sacred scriptures and first secular legislative acts. For instance, Torah and after it the Old Testament laid down such features (manifestations) of time in legislation and in application of law, as eternity, discontinuity, selectivity and termination of action, cyclicity of development, determinacy (inevitability) of events and legal facts and impossibility to subordinate the flow of time. Many of the aforesaid temporal features one may find in the Quranic, Vedic, other sacred scriptures, as well as in the monuments of secular legislation of different epochs and legal traditions. In the further legal development temporal features of law were not left unaltered. They have been changing, obtaining new features, preserving at the same time inseparable link with the initial sources which had given them life. Sacred scriptures and monuments of ancient law reveal different spatial attributes (manifestations) of law. Torah, Quran, sacred books of Hindu, Buddhist and other religious traditions had singled out the space of sovereign power of a state which was limited by national territorial boundaries and which was often including the enclaves of alien law. At the same time there had been a space of religious law individual and public conscience which was not limited by any state boudaries. Such dualism of spatial limits of law is preserved in our days, in particular, in Judaic and Islamic legal traditions. Other spatial manifestations of law also existed. Along with the norms of general action, there were norms embracing certain territories of the state, appropriate ethnical, merchant, artisan, agricultural communities, separate families, persons and belonging to them objects of movable and immovable property. Unity and at the same time fragmentation of spatial limits of law is also preserved in modern law. There also exists the expiration born in ancient time for enlarging the spatial space of law beyond the boundaries of their states.

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