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Communicative Approach and Legal Theory
It is apparent that the monistic, single-factor theory cannot explain the diverse world of law; for such explanation one
should refer to broad philosophical categories that could describe social (actual), normative, and ideal aspects of reality. This category in modern theoretical jurisprudence may well be the concept of “communication”. The idea of communication in law was developed in depth in the modern German philosophy of law (Werner Krawietz, Niklas Luhmann, Helmut Schelsky and others), but it is not alien in the Russian legal discourse either. This is evidenced by the writings of Leon Petrazycki and other members of the St. Petersburg school of legal philosophy, who as early as in the early 20th century have formulated the legal problems of communication and attempted to explore it using the terms of philosophy of that time. To rely on the developments done by members of this school and to use their ideas as a semantic light tower in (re)designing the communicative philosophy of law in Russia are a necessary prerequisite of the scientific discourse and, in particular, of the work within the framework of the “St. Petersburg Dialogue” that is held amongst Russian and German legal theorists.