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COMMUNITY JUSTICE // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2019. Issue 3 (25). P. 94-103

The term "community justice" encompasses a variety of institutions for conflict resolution and regulation of social behavior according to the norms prescribed by communities. This phenomenon is almost as old as the human society itself – it probably arose during the transition from the tribal community to the neighbor and had been existing until the formation of the nation-state in the Modern Age, and in many countries of the "third world" it is still existing nowadays. Notwithstanding this fact, the topic of community justice remains poorly studied in legal anthropology, especially in Russia. The main purpose of the article is to formulate basic provisions of the concept of community justice based on historical and ethnographic data. The author proposes a definition of the notion of "community justice", identifies the prerequisites for the emergence and preservation of this phenomenon. Further, he defines the basic elements of community justice, that is, sustainable social and mental structures that constitute institutional basis of the phenomenon, as well as the principles that determine its basic characteristics and features of functioning. In the final part of the article some controversial issues are discussed, such as the legal nature of community justice and its institutional structure. The arguments are presented in favor and against the position that community justice has a different legal nature than the state (dualism of the judicial power).

Keywords: justice, community, community justice, legal pluralism, customary law, community law, legal anthropology