The formation of the category «method of criminal law policy» in Ukrainian doctrine

Abstract

The article traces the formation of the category «method of criminal law policy» in Ukrainian criminal law doctrine. The chronological limits of the study are chosen on substantive grounds: the starting point is the adoption of the Criminal Code of Ukraine now in force, which gave the doctrine an essentially new normative material and, together with it, a new understanding of criminal law policy - of its subject matter, levels, actors and means of influence. It is established that in the doctoral study that laid the foundations of the domestic teaching on this policy the material from which the doctrine of methods would later be assembled is present in considerable detail, while the generalising category is still absent: criminalisation and decriminalisation are qualified as an instrument, the unit into which policy is divided is the direction, and the term «method» itself is used in the sense of a method of cognition. It is shown that the qualification «method» is first applied to a single phenomenon in a dissertation on the theory of criminalisation and remains unstable even within that same work, and that it is soon used in a number of independent texts as settled, none of which introduces it deliberately and none of which justifies the shift from the earlier designations. It is demonstrated that the doctrine receives, almost simultaneously, several incompatible answers to the question of the composition of the list of methods, offering no criterion for choosing between them, while the definition of a method appears later than the qualification itself and acquires neither developed criticism, nor refinements, nor competing variants correlated with it. It is substantiated that the content of the category changes chiefly within individual authorial lines rather than in polemics between schools, and that this change takes two forms - a change in the qualification of a particular phenomenon and a change in the composition of the list of methods itself. It is concluded that the list of methods takes a closed form chiefly in texts that mention it in passing rather than in those that discuss it deliberately.