The Use of the Evaluative Categories in Legislation in the Context of the Legal Certainty Principle (Through the Example of Corpus Delicti in Various Law Branches)

Every state uses evaluative categories (standards) in its legislation. Russian legislation is no exception. Statutory acts are mottled with evaluativecategories of various kinds: from long-known ones (“good faith”, “abuse of rights”) to debatable (“explicit disrespect for society”, “social group”). The purpose of the work is to identify the criteria for the admissibility of the use of the evaluative categories in legislation and to establish whether certain evaluative categories utilized in constructing the corpus delicti in tax, administrative and criminal law meet these criteria. The scientific novelty of the study consists in conduction of comprehensive analysis of various aspects of the principle of legal certainty and a significant array of specific evaluative categories with the use of numerous doctrinal sources, judicial practice, and the experience of foreign states. The conducted research allowed to propose a test for the admissibility of the use of the evaluative categories in the legislation which encapsulates 3 criteria (scope of regulation, validity, concretization), as well as some extra-legal parameters (level of legal awareness, legal culture and professionalism of the judiciary). The author comes to a conclusion that it is inadmissible to use certain evaluative categories in the legislation in the absence of their proper specification (“social group”, “explicit disrespect for society”, “mass distribution of extremist materials”, etc.).