Historical and legal prerequisites for the forensic expertise (“informed people”) institution emergence in the Russian procedural law of XI–XVIII centuries[Историко-Правовые Предпосылки Возникновения Института Судебной Экспертизы («Сведущих Людей») В Российском Процессуальном Праве Xi–Xviii Вв]

According to the Russian Federation Civil Procedure Code, examination refers to the means applied in the process of cases consideration to issues requiring special knowledge. In legal science, examination is defined as a procedural law institution and, like any legal institution, it has a historical tradition of establishment and further development. In every country, this tradition had its own patterns and features to be considered when improving legislation at present stage. Therefore, studying the history of the Russian expertise, including the legislative support in civil proceedings, is a key problem of historical and legal science. The problem is highly researched through the materials of the Soviet and modern civil process, but the establishment and development of the institution of expertise throughout the centuries-old history of the Russian law is yet to be comprehensively covered in the historical and legal literature. One of the urgent scientific purposes is, using the legislative sources, to restore the gradual differentiation of the institution of examination from the entire procedural law starting from the time of Ancient Rus and up to the 1864 judicial reform. The methodological background for such a historical and legal reconstruction is a dialectical combination of formal legal and comparative legal methods. The informational basis for the scientific research of this scientific problem is provided through a set of the published legislative documents of the Ancient Rus, the Moscow state and the Russian Empire times covering issues of using expert knowledge (knowledge of “informed people” in Russia’s terminology) in criminal and civil proceedings. The main research results are the identified development trends of perceptions about the need and usefulness of special knowledge used to solve complex issues of legal proceedings in the legal consciousness of the given time periods. The research provides for the conclusions that such perceptions emerged in the times of the Old Russian state, legislatively formalized in the Moscow state and differentiated as an element, primarily, of the criminal proceedings in the XVIIIth century. Such development character could be explained by the authorities’ main practical interest in using special knowledge, providing the leading position for medical expertise for that time period.