The Concept of guilt in Ukrainian law

Abstract

Background. So far the lawmakers of Ukraine, lawyers and scientists have not accumulated the unified and well-established approaches to lexical design of the legal concept of «guilt» and related legal concepts.
Materials and methods. The information base of research is the texts of existing legal acts of Ukraine and relevantscientific works of domestic scientists. The author used general scientific and special scientific methods, in particularstructural-systematic, that includes different components with their specific tasks and functions, which interact with each other for achievement of this objective, comparative legal and linguistic-legal methods and others.
Analysis of recent researches and publications. For the modern Ukrainian scientists who were engaged in legal interpretation of guilt, questions of definition and consolidation of its lexical-semantic configuration remains open. Therefore, the problem requires further study.
The aim of the article lies in the harmonization of legal approaches and the normalization of legal terminology to designate legal category and institution of guilt in the law and its branches, and other single-rooted terms.
The results of the study. There were reviewed scientific-theoretical, legislative and practical legal approaches to the concept of guilt as an inter-branch Institute of law and related concepts, variability (duality) of use of single-root terms in this semantic «nest» in legal texts, given relevant examples. There was indicated that duality (parallelism) of language design of legal terminology does not promote the correct application of the law, and causes confusion and contradictions, conflicts of law. There was implemented legal and etymology-morphological analysis of the terms: fault, guilt, blame, transgression, guiltiness, the accused, etc. The attention is focused on their stylistic features and the semantic content in the theory of law and practical jurisprudence; the legal statuses marked by them were delimited.
Conclusion. Theunified approach to the selection and proper application of legal terms of semantic nest in law, which are concentrated around the concept of «guilt» was justified and proposed.