Responsibility for Wrongdoing and Touching It: the Temporal Evolution of the Norms of Domestic Criminal Law

Abstract

In different periods of the development of the Russian state, the interest of legislators, theorists and practitioners in improving the measures of criminal legal influence on persons involved in crime in general and acts of injustice in particular was not the same. To a large extent, the criminalization of such acts was conditioned by the requirements of vital necessity in combating crimes that affect the priority interests of the State, including the legitimacy of State power, economic security and property rights.
 The purpose of the study is to determine the historical roots of the formation and evolution of the development of those forms of wrongdoing and touching them that have become the foundation of modern institutions of criminal law: obstruction of justice, harboring of crimes, failure to report a crime, connivance to crimes, criminal liability of legal entities and exemption from liability.
 The key means and ways to achieve the goal were temporal and comparative legal methods of studying the institutions of criminal responsibility for wrongdoing and touching it in legal sources of the XVXX centuries. Such an approach to the study made it possible in an evolutionary context to present the most clearly the conclusions of the transformation of the architectonics of various institutions of domestic criminal law familiar to our time.
 Their diachronic development follows from the temporal analysis of acts related to acts of injustice (harboring of crimes, failure to report a crime, connivance to crimes). Firstly, their legal nature has not always been identified with ways to counteract the administration of justice (in its broad sense, not only as the activity of the court, but also officials, individuals and even collective entities (legal entities) obliged to comply with the law, to promote the administration of justice and to execute judicial acts). Secondly, in certain historical periods, acts of wrongdoing and acts of persons touched were considered as encroachments on other public relations protected by law (for example, legitimate institutions of state power and economic security of the state).