Problems of understanding legal responsibility in modern law science

Abstract

The article reviews problematic aspects of understanding legal responsibility within current theoretical concepts in theory of law. Authors investigate the contents of such term as «legal responsibility» from perspectives of negative and positive approaches to defining this legal category. Representation of legal responsibility is considered in a form of a complex phenomenon, including two forms of realization: voluntary (positive) and state-forced (negative), from perspective implying unity of positive and negative aspects. Special attention is given to the study of native scientific literature, describing the viewpoints of Kazakh scientists in matters of understanding legal responsibility. It is concluded that the absence of agreement of opinion does not allow to formulate the definition containing all the characteristics of the studied phenomenon. However, the authors make an attempt to build up such a definition.