Prospects for Comparative Studies of Legal Change in Late Tsarist Russia: Judicial Reform of 1864 in the Crimea and the Volga Region

Abstract

The monograph under review makes an attempt to present new methodological trajectories in the study of the complex legal reality in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. The author of the monograph pays special attention to the problems of legal change in the conditions of cultural diversity, choosing the post-reform Crimea and Volga Region as the object of his research. The review focuses on the key conceptual principle of the book, namely the use of the content of legal pluralism to describe the complexity of the legal interaction between society and the state. In addition to this, the difficulties of using the materials of the judicial departments within the framework of the historical anthropological approach are emphasized. The author’s methodology is universal, and therefore it can be further successfully used by historians in the framework of regional and comparative studies of other regions of the empire.

Keywords

• judicial reform of 1864
• judicial statutes of 1864
• legal modernization
• legal pluralism
• ethnic minorities