Legal reference systems: How to determine the future by ordering the past

Abstract

The work aims to draw the attention of the scientific community to the problem of the influence of reference legal systems created and updated by commercial organizations on law enforcement, and to identify possible ways to solve this problem. The study was conducted using the method of content analysis, comparative and formal-logical methods, the method of forecasting. When studying the number of references in Russian judicial acts to the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, a significant difference was found depending on the time, region, and judicial instances in which these acts were issued. The comparison led to a conclusion that the selection of official documents for placement in the reference legal system is subordinated to local practices of companies, and practices further influence court rulings issued in various regions and instances. The oblivion of “old” judicial acts, their gradual intentional and well-intended extraction from the data banks of reference legal systems as new practices are formed, inevitably affects the views of lawyers. The cognitive ease that controls human behavior, the ease of searching in databases for the necessary acts using navigation tools make the selection of a range of possible solutions from the reference legal system under heavy load conditions too convenient to turn to more complex algorithms for preparing solutions. The result of finding a solution for a difficult, multifactorial situation, especially if it has not previously been the object of evaluation by this law enforcement officer, is purposefully set by an employee of a commercial organization responsible for placing precedents in the legal reference system, organizing hyperlinks, extracting metadata, providing brief information about the essence of the resolved dispute for search purposes. The authors come to the conclusion that regulatory legal regulation is not able to give a positive result and, most likely, will have a negative effect - to have a negative impact on the commercial attractiveness and relevance of the arrays of information collected and offered to the public. The development of standards for the formation of databases of reference legal systems by extracting metadata from them, establishing hyperlinks without the help and control of the state, could become an element, a link of collective knowledge of reality, which makes it possible to simplify the decision-making process by the law enforcement officer. The formation of databases of reference legal systems based on the cooperation of their developers with the leading universities of the country could contribute to the identification of new, best practices and at the same time limit the offer of the consequences of judicial errors as a model, in particular, by accompanying documents with additional information (cautionary commentaries).