Freedom and Potential Opportunities. Essay on Legal Progress

Abstract

The article attempts to explicate the philosophical foundations and criteria for legal progress. The author believes that legal progress is, first of all, a substantial and permanent increase in the degree of moral and legal freedom and justice based on the values of law, regulatory and constitutive norms, with the help of legal agents, tools and procedures, and also the expansion of social fields of potential opportunities, in which freedom and justice are embodied and intersected. Freedom and justice make possible the situation of a sharp increase in potential opportunities. The growth of both the levels of freedom and justice is to a large extent carried out by a legal (legislative) path. Therefore, if we, guided by the values of freedom and justice, lay the specific imperatives of freedom and justice in the regulatory framework of society, then here is just the multiplier effect: freedom and justice in norms (law) generate freedom and justice in potential opportunities, and the last expand again the normative basis of freedom and justice. In this case, legal progress looks like a combination of legislative actions that increase the level of freedom and justice. So, the increase in the levels of freedom and justice, the expansion of the totality of the potential opportunities - these are the main philosophical criteria for assessing legal reality.