Constitutional and legal regulation of the foundations of the spiritual and moral development of Russian society

Abstract

The 2020 constitutional reform moved spiritual and moral matters from the level of sectoral legislation to the level of the Fundamental Law for the first time, while the subsequent body of subordinate acts gave them the shape of an independent area of state policy. The legal nature of the resulting regulation remains uncertain: the relationship between traditional spiritual and moral values and constitutional values proper has not been resolved dogmatically, and the normative prescriptions are dispersed across acts of differing legal force in the absence of a legal definition and a framework federal law. The aim of the study is to establish the legal nature, structure and subject composition of the constitutional and legal regulation of the foundations of the spiritual and moral development of Russian society. The formal legal method, the method of systematic interpretation and the generalisation of the practice of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation are applied. It is established that the value provisions of Chapters 1–3 enshrine not a programmatic declaration but targeted duties of public authority, most distinctly expressed in part 4 of Article 67.1 and in subparagraph «v.2» of part 1 of Article 114; subordinate specification, above all the Fundamentals of state policy for the preservation and strengthening of traditional values, builds the strategic framework of implementation, while the Constitutional Court translates value formulas into an applicable standard of assessment. The normative density grows from the constitutional text towards the subordinate level, which reveals a hierarchy collision and justifies the need for a framework legislative act fixing the conceptual apparatus and the distribution of competence.