Siberian Law University

The article examines discretion as both a managerial and procedural principle that constitutes one of the key elements of the system of legal relations inherent in a state governed by the rule of law. Discretion is not limited, as is often assumed, to a mental operation performed by a public administrator or lawenforcement official when choosing one of the options permitted by legal norms. Rather, it is a fundamental principle that permeates the entire system of public administration and law enforcement in a rule-of-law state and forms an indispensable component of professional administrative, administrative-jurisdictional, and judicial activity. In conditions of regulatory incompleteness and heightened dynamism—particularly evident in extraordinary situations (pandemics, wildfire hazards threatening entire regions, large-scale terrorist acts, responses to military threats, climate-related disasters, etc.)—governance through absolutely precise normative prescriptions becomes impossible. Under such circumstances, discretion is an essential part of the mechanism that ensures flexibility and effectiveness of public administration. Various forms of this principle may be identified: from the use of discretionary powers when choosing between equivalent alternatives to the duty to give reasons for judicial and administrative decisions and to interpret norms containing evaluative concepts. The role of discretion is particularly significant in imposing administrative penalties and disciplinary sanctions and in emergency rule-making. It is important to recognize that discretion is not equivalent to arbitrariness; it is based on the duty of officials to adopt well-reasoned, rational, and fair decisions strictly within the framework of the law and constitutional principles. The Authors advocate recognising discretion as both an administrative-procedural and inter-branch principle, which may contribute to further systematisation of law-enforcement practice and to strengthening guarantees for the protection of citizens’ rights against abuses of power.

Emergency modes of network operation that occur during short circuits and due to improper operation of relay protection and automation devices can be the cause of the occurrence and development of ferroresonance processes, including in power transformers and reactors. When a ferroresonance occurs, the vibration of the magnetic core of the transformer or reactor and the harmonic distortions of the mains voltage and current increase instantaneously compared to the duration of the heating process of electrical equipment above the permissible temperature. Harmonic distortion of voltage and current can be caused by the nonlinear nature of the consumer’s load. Therefore, a rational way to detect the ferroresonance process in power transformers and reactors is to detect it through a change in the vibration level of the magnetic core. The article discusses a device for detecting the ferroresonance process in power transformers and reactors by measuring the vibration level of a magnetic core. A design of a device for detecting a ferroresonance process at high magnetic field strengths and elevated temperatures is proposed. The adopted technical solutions make it possible to reduce noise and interference in the information channel of the device by shielding the useful signal using thin-film metallization, reduce the heating of the sensitive element of the device by Foucault currents, and reduce remagnetization by eliminating massive metal assembly units and performing an inertial mass in the form of a package of metal sheets glued together with high electrical resistivity, using a piezoelectric plate and a magnetic platform made of materials with a high Curie temperature.

We present an algorithm determining the existence of an isomorphic embedding of one finitely generated partially commutative nilpotent group of class $$2$$ in another. It is shown how such embeddings can be constructed. We also describe an algorithm determining the existence of an embedding of a finitely generated partially commutative nilpotent group of arbitrary class $$l$$ with respect to a graph of nonzero radius in a free nilpotent group of class $$l$$ .

Introduction. Section II of the CPC of the RF “Participants of criminal proceedings” does not contain a complete list of persons involved in criminal proceedings. The analysis of the norms of criminal procedural legislation and law enforcement practice indicates a rather extensive list of persons actually involved in criminal proceedings, but their procedural status is not clearly defined. In this regard, this article is devoted to the issue of procedural consolidation of the general status of participants of the preliminary investigation stage. The purpose of the research is to propose amendments to the current criminal procedural legislation related to the introduction of a norm regulating the rights and obligations of all persons involved in criminal proceedings at the stage of preliminary investigation, but not specified in Section II of the CPC of the RF. Methods. In order to comprehensively analyse the issues related to the procedural status of persons whose legal status is not fixed in the criminal procedural legislation, general scientific methods were used: formal-logical, generalisation, analysis, description, and the legal-technical as a private-scientific method made it possible to propose changes in the legislation. Results. The author concluded that the participants of criminal proceedings, who do not have a procedural status regulated by law, have equivalent procedural opportunities. This allowed to suggest fixing a norm regulating the rights and obligations of all participants of the stage of preliminary investigation in the CPC RF.

Today, development is recognized as more intricate than in the past. Scholars and practitioners observe a shift in the development landscape since the turn of the millennium, emphasizing culture’s increasing role in social life. In postmodern theory, culture asserts a predominant position among other societal spheres. A balanced view positions culture as a vital component of everyday experience, marking a transition from a scarcity-driven society where economic necessity confines human behavior to a world where individual choice is expanded by the growing influence of the human factor over external conditions. This perspective does not narrowly define culture solely as high art or achievement of cultural standards seen in official discourse, but rather embraces its broad spectrum of manifestations across public life, representing the future direction of cultural policy.

Within the framework of this study, theoretical approaches to understanding public power in the context of various areas of scientific knowledge are analyzed. In the course of this work, attention is drawn to the constitutional approach, according to which the unified system of public power in the Russian Federation includes two independent, but interacting levels: state and municipal. In this regard, it is noted that the federal legislation adopted in the development of constitutional provisions significantly expands this approach and actually establishes a three-level system of public power. As a consequence, the problem of substantiating the existence of a unified system of public power in the subjects of the Russian Federation is being actualized. Using the system-logical method of research, the provisions of Federal Law No. 414-FZ of December 21, 2021 "On the general principles of the organization of public power in the Subjects of the Russian Federation", which normatively establish the category of a unified system of public power in the subject of the Russian Federation, are analyzed in the work. Certain provisions of the said federal law are not fully consistent with each other and with other federal legislation, including with regard to the constitutional and legal understanding of the unified system of public power. At the same time, attention is drawn to the fact that the territorial principle cannot underlie the allocation of an independent regional level of public power, since the derivation of public power from the understanding of "state" and "statehood", on the basis of equality of the subjects of the Russian Federation as a constitutional principle, makes it impossible to have a different ratio of intra-system connections in the systems of public power in the subjects of the Russian Federation. The formal legal approach made it possible to trace the dynamics of changes in the constitutional (statutory) legislation of the subjects of the Russian Federation, depending on the understanding of the place of state authorities of the subjects of the Russian Federation in the unified system of public power. Various normative variations of the constitutional (statutory) legislation of the subjects of the Russian Federation, aimed at bringing it into line with the same constitutional text, indicates the absence of an unambiguous and uniform understanding of the place of the system of state authorities of the subjects of the Russian Federation in the unified system of public power in the country. Thus, it is noted that the development of a uniform approach based on the positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, which are mandatory for all subjects of legislative activity, to the content of the category "unified system of public power in the Russian Federation" is fully capable of ensuring the goal of its formation stated in Part 3 of Article 132 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation in compliance with all constitutional principles and norms. In this regard, within the framework of the unified system of public power in Russia, we should not talk about independent unified systems of public power in the subjects of the Russian Federation, but should focus on the formation of a unified system of public power throughout the territory of our state.

The work explores the concept of “source of increased danger”, the approaches to determining which, in the doctrine of civil law, are far from unambiguous. The article summarizes the existing approaches to the definition of the concept of “source of increased danger”. The reasons for the need to develop a definition of the concept under study and fix it at the legislative level are indicated. One of these reasons is the rapid complication of technologies, the introduction of innovations in all spheres of society. Despite the centuries-old discussion of civilist scientists, there is still no established, more or less unambiguous position on this issue. Due to the fact that there are no clear, specific explanations in the acts of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, we believe that changes in the law are long overdue due to the ambiguity of individual terms (namely, the guilt of the victim, the owner of a source of increased danger, activities that pose an increased danger to others) used in Article 1079 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. The need to consolidate the concept of “source of increased danger” is thought by us as the most important goal of unifying terminology in all branches of Russian legislation. We proceed from subjective – objective conditioning of processes and phenomena, illustrating their interconnectedness due to forced close interaction. The Authors argue the need to adopt a separate federal law establishing the specifics of compensation for harm by activities that pose an increased danger to others. The development of new technologies, the activities of third parties, the behavior of the victim, the quality and characteristics of the causer of harm, conditions and conditions are the prerequisites for the situation itself as a source of increased danger. The generalization of judicial practice on the example of analyzing a specific case is an indicative example of the culprit of the incident avoiding responsibility and injustice of individual court decisions based on judicial discretion. Determining ways to improve the provisions of Article 1079 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, in our opinion, will ensure uniformity of judicial interpretation and, as a result, optimization of law enforcement in the field under consideration. However, our work outlines the common features of research for a number of new scientific problems that require further research work.

On October 11, 2010, France became the first European country to ban the full-face Islamic veil – the burqa and niqab, in public places. After France becoming a “pioneer” in this area, by contrast to the United Stated and Russia, facial veil prohibition acts have been adopted in several other European countries and discussed in even more. These acts and political debates have generated a colossal number of research papers – mostly on legal issues by lawyer-scholars, critical analyses and, I’m sure, will produce many more. They have mainly focused on different aspects of the right to religious and cultural freedom, the right to gender equality. However, the novelty of Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagor’s monograph “The Republic, Secularism and Security: France versus the Burqa and the Niqab” lies in a non-standard approach to the veil-ban issue – he investigates using different methodological instruments not only the legal core the ban, but also (and mostly) the factors motivating the French legislator, what it symbolizes. Since the niqab and burqa wearers are extremely rare in France, as in almost all European Countries, one may agree that there surely isn’t an actual social problem, needing to be regulated by the government. Such disproportional This difference between practical importance and French legislative effort have urged Professor Cohen-Almagor to dwell on the reasons of such a high interest by the public administration to the religious facial veil. The study was carried out using various scientific methods: general scientific (analysis, synthesis, modeling, abstraction, etc.), empirical (observation, statistics), specifically legal (comparative legal, axiological, sociological, hermeneutics), historical (diachronic, ideographic). Huge practical experience, thorough, systemic knowledge of the regulatory material and practical aspects of its implementation allow the Author to analyze the symbolic and instrumental role of the facial veil in France’s pursuit for national identity building.

This material opens a series of scientific publications planned by the editors of the Siberian Law Review journal, the Authors of which analyze the problem of administrative discretion (discretion), which is very relevant for Russian administrative legal theory and law practice, in the “question-answer” format. The scientific, theoretical and practical significance of the noted problem is predetermined by the fact that the exercise of discretionary powers by the public administration (as opposed to powers strictly bound by law) is fraught with the greatest threat to the rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of citizens, the rights and legitimate interests of organizations. The purpose of the study is to clarify issues related to the concept and essence of administrative discretion, its regulatory legal framework, forms of implementation, ways to establish the limits of discretion of public administration, criteria for assessing the legality of discretionary administrative acts, judicial and agency control over administrative discretion. The subject of the research is normative legal acts, legal principles, administrative and judicial acts, scientific works of Russian and foreign legal scholars. The hypothesis of the study is that, despite the abundance of scientific publications on administrative-discretionary topics, the domestic doctrine of administrative discretion is a motley mixture of judgments that do not agree with each other, often divorced from the needs of administrative and judicial practice, characterized by the absence of a single categorical apparatus. According to Yuri P. Solovey, an important, if not the most important section of administrative discretionary issues, are the limits of judicial control over administrative discretion, which has practically fallen out of the field of view of Russian scholars, despite the fact that it has been thoroughly studied abroad for more than a century and a half. From the point of view of Petr P. Serkov, the domestic science of administrative law has not yet properly answered three fundamental questions, namely: what is administrative discretion, what is it intended for and how is it carried out. The Authors of the publication are unanimous that such a “doctrine” of administrative discretion does not contribute to the development of legislative solutions to bring such discretion to the standards of a legal, democratic state. In the process of research, dialectical, formal-logical, formal-legal, comparative-legal methods of cognition, the method of interpreting law, analysis of materials from administrative and judicial practice are used. The Authors attempt to streamline the categorical apparatus of the theory of administrative discretion, as well as to formulate its main provisions and some proposals for improving the current legislation.