Russian Lawyers of Second Half of 19th Century on Political and Legal Concepts of Catherine II

The views of Russian lawyers of the second half of the 19th century regarding the political and legal concepts of Catherine II are considered. Attention is paid to educational and scientific works on the history of Russian law and Russian state law, published in the second half of the 19th century. The author proceeds from the fact that professional and class factors influenced the assessment of the empress's political and legal ideas by Russian lawyers. It is shown that the professional one consisted in the official introduction by Catherine II into the Russian political and legal turn of the achievements of European educators, contributing to the formation of a tendency towards the prevalence of the law over the will of the monarch. Particular attention is paid to the fact that most of the representatives of the legal profession were of noble origin, the 18th century was a relatively recent past for them, and family traditions and class identity formed a positive idea of Catherine's rule and the empress herself. At the same time, it is shown that researchers associated with the merchants paid attention to the fact that the empress's selective acquaintance with the works of European thinkers left her without attention to branches of law, for example, civil law, which was of fundamental importance for the estate employed in commerce and industry. The author notes that historians of law paid maximum attention to the state-legal concepts of the empress. It is proved that the conclusions made in the study correlate with the ambiguous assessments of Catherine II both among historians and Russian society as a whole.