The contributions of prof. M.n. gernet to the development of legal science

Abstract

The paper presents the biography and systematizes the research of a well-known Russian scholar Prof. M.N. Gernet. The authors single out different spheres of his work: 1) the theory and history of criminal law, including the theory of crime as a social phenomenon, the qualification of criminals and crimes, the concept of criminal law, types of punishment used in different countries as well as social security measures in the form of the penitentiary system, organization of inmates’ labor, their resocialization; 2) criminal law sociology, including the research of the dependence of the number of crimes on the economic conditions, such as the average salary, housing utility payments, size of dwelling, price of bread and other basic necessities; 3) criminal law statistics whose methods M.N. Gernet actively used, such as survey, questionnaires, observation, experiment, ranging (structuring); thanks to the crime and criminal personality research offices that he organized in different cities of the Soviet Union it was possible to collect data and to systematize it by the causes of crime, types of crimes, personal characteristics of some criminals (gender, age, education, marital status); 4) problems of juvenile delinquency analyzed by scholars using data on age groups of delinquents, which allowed to show the positive effect of the reduction of punishment depending on age, the hearing of cases by the Commission on Minors’ Affairs and a wide use of medical and pedagogical measures; 5) the history of using capital punishment, including a historical overview of using this type of punishment, which gave the scholar an opportunity to show that this measure does not affect the total number of crimes and has a negative impact on the psychological atmosphere in the society manifested through an increased number of civil disobediences and violent crimes; 6) crimes of Hitler’s army against humanity, which M.N. Gernet studied by collecting data on the number of war crimes against civilians, prisoners of war, hostages, analysis of mass shootings and the destruction of cities, villages, cultural monuments and other valuable objects; 7) biographies of legal scholars, including the information that M.N. Gernet collected on the work and contributions to the legal science of such famous lawyers as A.F. Konin, N.S. Tagantsev, V.K. Sluchevsky, I.Ya. Foinitsky, P.I. Lyublinsky, paying special attention to the monographs and textbooks that they wrote.