Keyword: «school of natural law»

The article analyzes the historical conditions of the formation of Russian jurisprudence in the second half of the XIX century and the main theories of legal understanding that played a major role in the development of Russian jurisprudence of this period. The methodological crisis of Russian jurisprudence in the second half of the XIX – early XX century characterizes the process of transition of science to a new type of scientific rationality. The problem that was solved by theoretical lawyers of the second half of the XIX – early XX century. It consisted in the development of new approaches to law, which meant an answer to the question of the essence of law, its legal nature, and appropriate ways of studying it. The author shows that by the middle of the XIX century, the main legal concepts were distributed among the corresponding schools of legal understanding: legal positivism, which in turn differentiated according to its source, method and peculiarities of interpretation of the nature of law (formally dogmatic, sociological and imitating the methodology of natural science); the school of natural law and the historical school of law. Despite the variety of types of legal understanding common in Russia after the reform period, many theorists considered legal positivism to be the most promising methodology for studying law that meets the requirements of scientific knowledge.