This article completes a series of three scientific publications planned by the Editorial Board of the Siberian Law Review, the Authors of which discuss the problem of administrative discretion, which is very relevant for Russian administrative legal theory and legal practice, in a question-answer format. Contrary to the opinion justified by Petr P. Serkov in the previous article about the impossibility of a fruitful study of administrative discretion without referring to the “analytical potential of the mechanism of administrative legal relations”, Yuri P. Solovey gives arguments indicating the unsuitability of this “logical structure” for studying legal realities. From his point of view, the use of this artificial and meaningless concept, without a doubt, is a violation of the well-known methodological principle “Occam’s Razor”: one should not multiply things unnecessarily. In this regard, PetrP. Serkov was asked two questions: firstly, could he conduct, within the framework of this article, an indicative analysis of a specific discretionary administrative act using the “logical structure of the mechanism of administrative legal relations”, which would make it possible to draw a conclusion about the legality (illegality ) of such an act, and, secondly, what is its relation to the principles of administrative procedures as legal means of control over administrative discretion and the need for their extensive legislative consolidation. Anticipating the answers to the questions posed, Petr P. Serkov critically analyzes the arguments of “discretionary disagreement” of the specified Author. It is concluded that the phenomenon of administrative discretion covers any managerial decision made by any official of state executive bodies and local governments in the exercise of any of the powers assigned to him. Such a vision of administrative discretion implies a significant adjustment of the method of its research, the priorities of which should be a person, his consciousness and psyche. Concerning the first of the questions asked, Petr P. Serkov, using the “analytical potential of the mechanism of legal relations”, analyzes a hypothetical situation in which a police officer performs a discretionary administrative action by stopping a vehicle. The Author argues that the named “potential” clarifies not only what administrative discretion is, but also how it is formed and what it is intended for. Answering the second question, Petr P. Serkov notes that the procedural legal regulation of the activities of state executive bodies will certainly bring positive effects to the phenomenon of administrative discretion, but it is not clear to what extent the principles of administrative procedures are able to prevent illegal administrative discretion. It should be taken into account that scientific controversy regarding the understanding of legal principles has been going on for decades without the prospect of reaching a doctrinal consensus. In general, the discussion of the essence of administrative discretion shows, according to Petr P. Serkov, the imperfection of the current state and the conceptual vulnerability of the methodology of conducting scientific research and scientific controversy.

The article analyzes the interaction between administrative discretion and the main social regulators – religion, ethics and law. It is shown that historically discretion arises as a religious institution, consisting in the trust of public authorities and their officials in prophets – people who are able to contact with the divine forces. The procedure of discretio spirituum, used in the Middle Ages to determine whether a person is a prophet or a false prophet, is described separately. The significance of this procedure is expressed in the partial secularization of discretion, that is, the assumption by church authorities that the divine injunctions can be interpreted, supplemented, or ignored not only by God, but also by the aforementioned persons (prophets). This recognizes that discretion can be both negative (negative) and positive (positive); that the amounts of discretion granted to prophets must be in direct proportion to the degree of trust in them; and that there are specific criteria according to which to establish what amounts of discretion will be granted to prophets. After many centuries, this concept of administrative discretion has remained virtually unchanged. Ethical science reproduces it almost literally: it again refers to the trust, which this time is granted to executive authorities and their officials, as well as to the degree of such trust, which determines the scope of discretionary powers and is determined by certain criteria. Legal science borrows the above theory less explicitly, but its echoes can be detected there as well. In particular, according to one of the concepts of law understanding the law embodies a distrust (degree of distrust) between the people, and since the law and discretion are usually opposed to each other, discretion is again defined as trust (degree of trust). In the conclusion the conclusion is made about the special relevance of this approach to the administrative discretion because since 2020 the trust is a constitutional category.

The issues of legal regulation of local self-government in the Russian Federation have been the subjects of numerous studies and discussions for a long time, while their intensity and relevance not only does not decrease, but also increases from year to year. In many ways, this is due to the fact that over the 30-year period of modern Russian history, the legislation on local self-government and its law enforcement practice is characterized by an extreme degree of dynamism and uncertainty, which certainly affects the quality of organization and functioning of this level of public authority. The meeting of the Council for the Development of Local Self-Government under the President of the Russian Federation, held on April 20, 2023, once again showed the existence of issues and the need for the authorities to find the optimal model of regulatory regulation of municipal government and the extreme imperfection of the provisions of draft law No. 40361-8 “On the general principles of the organization of local self-government in a unified system of public power”, which undoubtedly causes the need for scientific understanding and development of relevant proposals. Based on the historical and legal analysis of the development of the provisions of federal legislation on local self-government, the established constitutional and legal judicial practice, the experience of direct professional activity in local self-government bodies, the Author concludes that the federal legislator over the past 30 years of the existence of local self-government in our state has not only failed to definitively determine the basic legal provisions of the foundations local self-government, constantly “ranking” them and changing them, but it also significantly modified the originally laid down constitutional and legal essence of local self-government as a form of direct participation of citizens in solving issues of the territory of their residence. In this regard, the Author of the study suggests several “fundamental” provisions that will allow us to return to the constitutional and legal format of local self-government, laid down in the early 1990s. It seems that taking into account and consolidating the proposed foundations in the formation of a promising legal regulation of local self-government within the framework of building a unified system of public authority in our state will not only eliminate obvious “excesses” in the current system of legal regulation, but also fully provide a basis for effective interaction of bodies of a unified system of public authority in the interests of the population of the relevant territory.

The article continues the discussion organized by the journal with the participation of professors Yuri P. Solovey and Petr P. Serkov on the problem of administrative discretion. The Author proposes to look at the difference between the internal content of administrative discretion and judicial discretion, which is evolutionarily incorporated in the proceedings on administrative offenses. The reader is invited to the conclusion that administrative responsibility has historically been imposed by government bodies for disobedience to the current management order. The authorized body acts on behalf of the public authority, and the responsibility imposed by it means the responsibility of a person to the government for disobedience to its internal policy. In Russia, it arose in the 1920s, when V. I. Lenin considered the people's courts weak in resolving issues of the application of public law penalties to persons who do not comply with the norms established by the Soviet government. The judicial order arose and evolved as a people's revision of the public authorities' initiative for administrative prosecution. Such a reform of administrative responsibility was carried out after the death of I.V. Stalin N. S. Khrushchev, who, trying to restore the lost trust of society in the authorities, believed that administratively punishable acts should cause condemnation not only of the authorities, but also of society. Some categories of cases of administrative offenses were assigned to the competence of the people's court. The court acts on behalf not of the public authority, but of the country as a whole. When imposing a punishment, the court declares the person guilty before the country not of an anti-government, but of an anti-social act. Administrative responsibility is evolutionarily connected with the discretion of the jurisdictional body. Its content is various social rules and values, including principles, as well as political considerations. Administrative discretion is dominated by managerial values: general prevention, ensuring public order, controllability of the masses, tax collection, implementation of state policy, etc. Judicial discretion, being realized on behalf of the country, reproduces the social norms and values of Russian society as a whole. Both legislative norms and managerial values are preserved, but become part of the general range of social norms and values, which is dominated by the universal principles of justice, reasonableness, proportionality and an adequate balance of private and public interests.

The work explores the concept of “source of increased danger”, the approaches to determining which, in the doctrine of civil law, are far from unambiguous. The article summarizes the existing approaches to the definition of the concept of “source of increased danger”. The reasons for the need to develop a definition of the concept under study and fix it at the legislative level are indicated. One of these reasons is the rapid complication of technologies, the introduction of innovations in all spheres of society. Despite the centuries-old discussion of civilist scientists, there is still no established, more or less unambiguous position on this issue. Due to the fact that there are no clear, specific explanations in the acts of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, we believe that changes in the law are long overdue due to the ambiguity of individual terms (namely, the guilt of the victim, the owner of a source of increased danger, activities that pose an increased danger to others) used in Article 1079 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. The need to consolidate the concept of “source of increased danger” is thought by us as the most important goal of unifying terminology in all branches of Russian legislation. We proceed from subjective – objective conditioning of processes and phenomena, illustrating their interconnectedness due to forced close interaction. The Authors argue the need to adopt a separate federal law establishing the specifics of compensation for harm by activities that pose an increased danger to others. The development of new technologies, the activities of third parties, the behavior of the victim, the quality and characteristics of the causer of harm, conditions and conditions are the prerequisites for the situation itself as a source of increased danger. The generalization of judicial practice on the example of analyzing a specific case is an indicative example of the culprit of the incident avoiding responsibility and injustice of individual court decisions based on judicial discretion. Determining ways to improve the provisions of Article 1079 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, in our opinion, will ensure uniformity of judicial interpretation and, as a result, optimization of law enforcement in the field under consideration. However, our work outlines the common features of research for a number of new scientific problems that require further research work.

The relevance of the topic is due to the fact that the problems of the procedural position of a witness today need some addition and adjustment, while this particular issue requires special attention in connection with the expansion of the information space and the simplification of access to information contained in the materials of the criminal case of all participants in criminal proceedings. The question of the participation of a lawyer in criminal proceedings in order to provide qualified legal assistance to a witness remains important. In particular, the procedure for involving a lawyer in a criminal case has not been established, his procedural status has not been clearly regulated, and the issue of the possibility and limits of participation of a lawyer in investigative actions conducted with a witness has not been resolved. The purpose of the study is to analyze the legal problems related to the realization by the witness of his rights, the performance of his duties. The article deals with problematic issues related to the procedural status of a witness, analyzes the relevant norms of domestic criminal procedure legislation and the legislation of a number of foreign countries. The methodological basis of the work was the position of the general scientific dialectical method of cognition and the general theory of law, which made it possible to reveal the essence and features of the procedural status of a witness in pretrial criminal proceedings. The work widely uses the comparative legal method, which made it possible to identify the relationship between domestic and foreign legislation in the field of witness immunity. As a result, the following conclusions were made. It seems that it is necessary to provide a witness who has not formally received the status of a suspect or accused with qualified legal assistance on a mandatory basis, in order to protect his legal rights and interests. In addition, part 3 of Art. 56 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, supplementing it with a ban on taking evidence from all persons who, by virtue of their official duties, are its bearers and must keep it.