The interpretation of the law in judicial activity, as well as the search for specific features of the interpretation of the criminal law, belong to the category of topics whose relevance in modern conditions is increasing much. The contradiction between the growing criminalization and the increasing concern about the observance of human rights and freedoms actualize the status of interpretation as one of the most important aspects of legal activity, directly ensuring the rule of law in criminal law relations. In any law-making text, there are always a lot of subjective meanings, only one of which can objectively be the basis of a judicial decision. Based on the generalization of the existing approaches to understanding the interpretation of the law, two of its basic models are distinguished - the model of the presentation of the parliamentary meaning and the model of the presentation of the judicial meaning of the law. It is proved that law enforcement is determined precisely by the judicial meaning of the law, the establishment of which in the process of interpretation is a significant component of judicial legal policy. Understanding the meaning of the criminal law has a specificity being predetermined by the public nature of the branch of criminal law, this impresses the course of action of the court within the framework of the implementation of the principle of separation of powers. However, this specificity cannot consist of, as it is commonly considered to be in science, in limiting the methods of interpretation used by the court or establishing a rigid hierarchical sequence in the application of methods of interpretation. The specificity of the interpretation of the criminal law should be determined not by the methods of interpretation, but by the principles of criminal law. Their content, in turn, should be revealed through an appeal to the goals of criminal law regulation. According to the results of the study, the general approach to the interpretation of the criminal law, which being literal as a matter of priority, should combine a restrictive understanding of any legal restrictions and a broad understanding of any defenses against a charge of a crime.

Modern criminology and criminal law are in the prolonged crisis provoked by inadequate and ineffective mechanism of informational circulation between these two spheres of social science and practice. The failure in the production of criminological information and its perception by criminal law serves as a symptom and as a cause of this crisis simultaneously. The way out of the crisis is seen as the analysis of the main components of the criminological information circulation mechanism and finding the way of its perfection. On the basis of critical analysis of the achievements of modern science the article investigates the main directions of perspective development of criminological science in order to produce modern and claimed by criminal law information. The research discusses the scientific problems of the production and circulation of scientific criminal information and the results of criminal law activities; proposes the mechanisms of calculation and use of criminological information in law making and law enforcing activities.

In the situation of growing uncertainty for the society of global risk, new management technologies based on the concept of risk management should penetrate all spheres of human activities, including the sphere of regulating legal relations and enforcement of law norms by courts. Risk-oriented justice is a new area for Russian jurisprudence, and the author aims to outline key approaches to analyzing the opportunities of using the concept of «risk» to optimize the process of adjudication. The author presents the scientific definition of risk, draws attention to the necessity of identifying, assessing risks, i.e., the possible dangers inevitably emerging in the criminal court activities. Risks are ranged depending on their source, and the necessity of differentiating the strategies of reacting to various risks is proven. The author defines the infrastructure of making a court decision in the conditions of risk, which includes the following: the existence and due normative regulation of the space for court risk; effective rules of adjudication; due information support of adjudication; clearly defined goals of risky court actions. It is shown that uncontrolled risks lead to wrong judgments, reduce the stability of sentences and create victims of unfair justice. The author suggests implementing the idea of risk-oriented justice based on the principles and techniques of risk management developed by the science of riskology, which minimize risks and their consequences.