Lafitsky V.I. Universal Laws of the Development of Law

Abstract: The first one is the law of survival of more solid and stable formations. The history of law knows a great number of examples of collisions of great communities or families of law. The most dramatic one is the collapse of the socialist community of law destroyed under the pressure of more powerful western tradition of law. The second universal law is the preservation of the variety of life of nature and law. Despite any processes of globalization, law preserves not only the variety but a necessary balance of its forms. Law of modern world has been formed within the frames of different systems of religious or ethical legal visions of the world and preserves their main features. For instance, law of states of Europe and America develop in the main in the river-bed of Christian values of freedom and the law of the main part of the states of Western Asia and Northern Africa in accordance with Islamic commandments of social unity. In Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and some other states law develop in the system of Buddhist notions of righteous life and law of China on the basis of Confucian ideas of universal harmony. Such fundamental values of law function regardless of their acknowledgment by state, degree of their reflection in legislation or of the role church in the public life determining differences of communities of law of the modern world. Their total disappearance is impossible. When they are not preserved in legislation, they will act in other dimensions of law – in legal customs and traditions, in legal ideology and legal conscience. The third universal law is the ungovernability of elements born in nature and law. Laws rarely act as they were conceived by their authors. State and civil society, international communities, natural phenomenon change the life of laws proving short-sightedness or impotence of lawgivers. The fourth universal law is the constant evolution of nature and law, appearance of their new forms under the impact of numerous and varying factors of life. It is necessary to provide for the constant adaptation of legal systems and at the same time to preserve their stability in the competition for the legal space of the modern world.

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