From the perspective of the humanities, liability emerges as a complex social phenomenon and is therefore analyzed using the methods and principles of individual doctrinal concepts, including the genus– species relationship among social, legal, and criminal liabilities. The idea of distinguishing between the positive and negative types of legal liability is critically evaluated. Legal and criminal liabilities arise in conflictual settings caused by a person’s negative attitude to public interests, which leads to the commission of an offense or a criminal act. The scope of criminal liability involves a combination of legal consequences for both the criminal act itself and any subsequent post-offense criminal conduct.

The most pressing theoretical and practical problems related to the study of environmental security were outlined. A brief historical overview of the contributions made by both Russian and foreign scholars that highlights the importance of the methodological, axiological, and praxeological rethinking of human– nature interactions was provided. The results show that the emerging misalignment between the pursuit of economic and technological progress and the increasingly fragile state of the environment entails significant risks and threats to human life as such. From a methodological perspective, in order to investigate the problems of environmental security at the cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary levels of legal science, the systems-thinking-and-activity (STA) method should be involved. The STA method brings into the scholarly and practical legal discourses the importance and necessity of integrating projects, schemes, and regulations of practical activities with their subsequent analysis across various scientific disciplines (sociohuman, natural, and technical) or their synergy. This integrated approach has the potential to improve the development, enforcement, and application of law in the protection of human environmental rights, conservation of the environment, and promotion of the sustainable use of natural resources for long-term support of civilizational progress.

This article analyzes experimental legal regimes as a way to prevent abuse and infringement of basic human rights amid the large-scale adoption of cutting-edge technologies and innovations. Experimental legal regimes, such as “regulatory sandboxes”, are structured frameworks permitting the development and testing of innovative solutions, including regulatory ones, within an isolated and supervised environment. The characteristics of experimental regulatory tools were investigated from the perspective of the economic analysis of law, emphasizing the need to use their regulatory flexibility, responsiveness, and focus on practical outcomes in order to test new technological solutions safely. The method of comparative legal research was employed to correlate different approaches to the use of experimental legal regimes in various countries and integration associations. With the help of legal modeling, a hypothetical construction of “regulatory sandboxes” promoting universal human values was developed. The analysis of the current legislation, legal practice, and scholarly literature revealed that experimental legal regimes are not inherently a universal solution for the humane deployment of innovations. However, they can counteract dehumanization when guided by thoughtful legal strategies and value-based enforcement. A list of principles (inadmissibility of human rights violations, voluntary participation, transparency, openness, ensuring the safety of individuals and society) that could be incorporated when stipulating the concept of using “sandboxes” within the Eurasian Economic Union was presented.

Three books on the legal regulation of artificial intelligence and the digital transformation of labor were analyzed. The contributions of Russian and Belarussian scholars working in an emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of jurisprudence, social sciences, and technology were summarized and assessed. The first publication, I.A. Filipova’s textbook, includes lectures, seminar plans, recommended readings, practical assignments, etc. The lecture content using a problem-based approach to cover the legal regulation of artificial intelligence was examined. The author not only discusses and briefly describes the seven topics of the lecture course but also raises some controversial issues associated with the development and legal regulation of artificial intelligence systems and technologies. The second publication, I.A. Filipova’s monograph, is dedicated to the challenges of digitalization and its impact on labor relations and labor law. The third publication, written by a team of Belarussian researchers, explores the global experience in artificial intelligence regulation and outlines the strategies for artificial intelligence governance in the Republic of Belarus. Collectively, all three books considered here hold significant value for comparative legal studies and the coordinated development of legal regulation of artificial intelligence within the Union State of Russia and Belarus.

This article analyzes the functional potential of legal procedural policy as a doctrinal and practical tool. Its four main functions were identified: doctrinal, managerial, organizational, and supervisory, each playing a critical role in the state’s efforts to ensure justice, uphold the rule of law, and protect of the rights of participants in the judicial process. The problems of goal setting in modern procedural legislation, the fragmentation of goals and objectives in law enforcement, poor court management and organization, and ambiguities in the supervisory system were critically examined. The analysis shows that the effective development of legal procedural policy is possible only under the condition of a systematic approach that methodologically combines normative, functional, and axiological aspects. Legal analytics emerges as an important mechanism for increasing the effectiveness and transparency of justice through objective evaluation, rigorous doctrinal analysis, and forecasting of the consequences of the application of law. The need to shift from the broad application of procedural rules to their targeted outcome-oriented effectiveness based on the principles of fairness, legality, accessibility, and technological modernization of the judicial system was emphasized.

This article explores the issues associated with expert support in the legislative process of the Russian Federation and their impact on ensuring legal security. It was demonstrated that the expertise of draft laws should be considered as an effective way to safeguard legal security, which guarantees the elimination of risks (threats) that compromise the quality of adopted laws. The main types of legislative risks (threats) to legal security were considered: corruption factors, linguistic errors, failure to adequately assess potential negative consequences of the legislative enactment, etc. The definitions of the concepts of “draft law expertise” and “legal security” were refined, emphasizing their relationship. The need for systematization of the legislation governing the organization and exercise of expert involvement in the legislative process was substantiated in order to codify the system of expert examinations and specify their objectives, scope, subject, and responsible actors.

Under the constitutional reform introducing the principle of unified public authority in federal Russia into the Russian legal space, there has been a growing interest in the subjects of executive power that functioned as part of a unified system even before the constitutional changes of 2020. Focusing on healthcare sector, this article explores how the principle of unity of executive power system contributes to securing state guarantees at the federal and regional levels. The organizational and functional aspects of executive institutions were identified, as well as their interactions with the head of the state, representatives of executive power at the federal level, and the civil society. The important legislative updates aimed at improving the assessment of the quality of public healthcare services were examined, and the obstacles to achieving the law’s intended objectives were discussed. The methodology used includes comparative legal analysis (to investigate the hierarchical relationships in the system of executive bodies across different subjects of Russia) and formal legal reasoning (to determine their powers at the subject level). Some recommendations were made to enhance the effectiveness of executive institutions in the field of healthcare. The obtained results can be helpful for further development of theories on the unity of public authority, human and civil rights and freedoms.

The agreement-based regulation of recreational activities in specially protected natural areas, focusing particularly on national parks, was examined under the legal systems of the Russian Federation, the Portuguese Republic, the Italian Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Kingdom of Spain. Various types of agreements that may be reached between public and private entities of these countries to carry out such recreational projects were discussed in detail. A comparative analysis of the relevant Russian and European laws was performed. The study concludes that the Portuguese, Italian, German, and Spanish laws are characterized by greater flexibility, decentralized approach, and ample opportunities for concluding agreements on recreational activities in specially protected natural areas. In contrast, the Russian legal system is more formalized and requires mandatory auctions to negotiate and finalize agreements on any recreational initiatives in national parks.

This article examines the conflict-of-laws regulation applying to the cross-border transit of electric energy. The analysis revealed that such transit is a technically complex and legally nuanced process. It can be accomplished by actually moving and (or) replacing electric energy. The selected option affects the type of contracts concluded and the conflict-of-laws rules applied to them. The conflict-of-laws regulation governing the electric energy transit among different countries includes: 1) general conflict-oflaws rule recognizing the parties’ autonomy to choose the applicable law; 2) subsidiary conflict-of-laws rule allowing courts to determine the applicable law based on the type of the contract and the party with principal performance obligations; and 3) corrective clause permitting courts to apply the law of the party most closely connected to the actual execution of the contract.

Similar to the European Union using a system of directives to regulate how waste is managed, Russia has adopted the Federal Law “On Industrial and Consumer Waste” as a standard-setting legal tool in its waste policy. The EU directives set out shared objectives for mitigating the waste crisis, while leaving the member states free to decide about precise implementation methods. Directive 2008/98/EC establishes a clear hierarchy of priorities in addressing waste issues, which includes prevention, preparing for reuse, recycling, other recovery, and disposal. In contrast, Russian legislation lacks detailed provisions for dealing with waste. The EU law also defines criteria for classifying by-products of industrial processes and prescribes a legal procedure for granting the end-of-waste status under certain conditions, thereby reducing the regulatory burden, yet not precluding litigating disputes in court over the classification of substances as waste or by-products. In the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan, the regulations on handling waste align, in many ways, with Russia’s approach, but they still have some distinctive features. Belarusian law distinguishes secondary material resources from other types of waste, and Kazakhstan has developed well-elaborated regulatory standards for qualifying waste as products. Therefore, both Russian and foreign legal systems give priority to classifying substances as waste, which may complicate the transition to a circular economy.

This article examines key characteristics of economic crime rate, putting emphasis on the possibility of establishing its threshold and critical values. Robust economic security policy should be considered one of the top priorities of any state, and ensuring it requires continuous assessment of how well national interests are fulfilled and balanced. Among various approaches to the assessment of economic security level and threats, the indicator-based method, which involves setting threshold and critical values for specific indicators, has been widely used. The study shows that Russia’s economic security policy is much determined by the frequency and severity of criminal activities aimed at obtaining financial profit and demands increased attention to corruption and criminalization in order to avoid lackluster results. However, quantitative metrics of economic crimes alone are insufficient to reliably assess the state’s economic security level. Therefore, neither threshold nor critical values can be assigned to this parameter.

This article examines “behavior” as a fundamental category of Russian correctional law that governs the imposition, execution, and remission of criminal penalties in both penitentiary and post-penitentiary contexts. The essence of crime, a form of illegal conduct exhibited by a legal subject that violates the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and warrants criminal prosecution, was analyzed. The intrinsic link between the legal category of “behavior” and key institutions of criminal law such as “crime” and “punishment” was considered. It was revealed that the grounds for legal coercion and incentives under criminal law are justified by “behavior”, which can be criminal (because criminality manifests itself through criminal conduct), unlawful, and lawful. The importance of the category of “behavior” for correctional practices stems from its consistency with their basic principles. The interdisciplinary nature of “behavior” and its incorporation into the conceptual framework of correctional law, which regulates the pre-penitentiary, penitentiary, and post-penitentiary stages of legal conduct, all taken into account by the law enforcer when deciding on the application of coercive and incentive-based legal measures, were demonstrated. The legal definitions of “post-criminal behavior,” “good behavior,” “exemplary behavior,” “antisocial behavior,” “penitentiary behavior,” and “post-penitentiary behavior” of convicted persons that determine the effectiveness of law enforcement were introduced.

Given the large number of crimes committed by minors, despite the downward trend in their dynamics, the involvement of minor offenders in criminal proceedings as a distinct group of procedural actors has become inevitable. Accordingly, the state is facing a pressing need to ensure that minors enter the criminal justice system in a way that is safe and takes into account their cognitive, moral, and psychological characteristics. Achieving this requires a robust scientific support for the process of preliminary investigation and the full range of investigative procedures in which minor suspects or witnesses take part. However, while some investigative practices have been well-supported by scholarly research, others, such as on-site verification of testimony when minors are involved, remain underexplored. The emergence of minors as a special category of participants in on-site testimony verification introduces many criminalistic problems that must be addressed. Here, some of the most common criminalistic difficulties encountered by law enforcement officials and demanding scholarly solutions were examined in order to develop practical recommendations. The recommendations were formulated using the identified system of theoretical and applied provisions, as well as considering the results of the analysis of the empirical base, which summarized data on 20 criminal cases with minors involved in the on-site testimony verification procedures and the anonymous survey of 15 investigators, each with at least two years of professional experience.

The current state and prospects for the development of the intersectoral institution ensuring personal security of individuals in the field of criminal justice were examined. Evidence was provided in favor of the idea that this protective structure is becoming increasingly oriented towards improving the effectiveness of criminal procedure actions in identifying and mitigating the post-offense unlawful impact on participants in criminal proceedings. Legal mechanisms for safeguarding personal security were considered as a specific order of functioning of the intersectoral system of legal, organizational, tactical, and operationalinvestigative measures and means, which are aimed at defending the life, health, and property of protected individuals. Other emerging trends in the evolution of the studied institution were outlined: the incorporation of information technologies, the establishment of a balance between publicity and confidentiality of the security measures applied, the resolution of conflicts between the legitimate interests of protected individuals, public bodies, and the state as a whole.

This study is motivated by the current requirements to incorporate a practice-oriented approach into the Service-Learning Program of higher educational institutions. The social and educational missions of legal clinics based on key service-learning principles were explored. The role of project work in service-learning was analyzed. The social projects carried out by the legal clinic at the Law Institute of South Ural State University (National Research University) in accordance with the training/specialty areas of students and for solving certain social problems were described. The innovative project “Free Legal Aid to Students” offers free online legal counseling to students of all levels and forms of education. Another initiative, the project “Law for You – You for the Law” (legal education of schoolchildren) is aimed at fostering legal literacy among students of general education institutions. The strengths and limitations of embedding legal clinics in the Service-Learning Program were outlined. Recommendations for overcoming existing organizational challenges were provided.