The polysemantic term legal nature has been actively and for a long time used in Russian legal science in terms of research of almost all legal phenomena. Its usage by jurisprudence traces back to the writings of pre-revolutionary national scholars, expands in scientific works of legal scholars of the Soviet period, and amounts to a truly tremendous scale in present-day legal papers. Seemingly, such a huge demand for the term and (correspondingly) for the concept denoted by it should have led to a plenty of specific studies and certainty in interpretation of the term. However, this did not happen and understanding of the legal phenomena nature is rather a result of intuitive perception than that of logical thinking. Those rare cases, in which legal scholars try to define the term nature as applied to the legal phenomena, only intensify its uncertainty by deepening its polysemy. The article makes an attempt in the article to delimit the term nature and the competitive term essence, as well as substantiates a thesis of the methodological role of the notion nature for the legal phenomena cognition.

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