Access to Justice in Eastern Europe (May 2021)
EVALUATION OF THE RESULTS OF THE HISTORICAL AND LEGAL COMPARISON OF THE JUVENILE JUSTICE OF UKRAINE AND POLAND IN THE 1920s
Abstract
The methodology of comparative historical and legal research is extremely complex, as each stage puts forward a number of specific requirements for the qualification of a historian, as well as for the procedure for working with historical and legal material. However, despite the importance of comparative analysis, which consists of comparing historical and legal objects, the stage of interpreting and evaluating the results of comparative research remains the priority in the context of heuristic knowledge. However, there are still no clear algorithms by which the comparative historian can perform this task, nor is there a general understanding of the direction in which the data obtained during the historicallegal comparison should be explained. Particular difficulties arise in interpreting the results of the comparison of specific historical and legal objects such as the court and the judiciary. In this article, we try to overcome this discrepancy between the theory and practice of the comparative historical and legal method using the comparative analysis of juvenile justice in Ukraine and Poland in the 1920s, recreating the sequence of actions of a comparative historian, which lead to important scientific results. The structure of the article is determined by its main task and therefore begins with the coverage of theoretical and methodological principles of interpretation and evaluation of the results of comparative historical and legal analysis. In particular, this part deals with the main approaches to the explanation of the data obtained during the comparison of historical and legal objects, as well as the primary rules and principles of their interpretation. The next part of the article is devoted to a specific example comparing juvenile commissions of the Ukrainian SSR and juvenile courts and probation officers of Poland in the 1920s and further explanation of the information obtained. Finally, the last part of the article explores the possibilities and prospects of historical and legal forecasting at the stage of evaluating the results of a comparative study.
Keywords
