The interconnection between freedom, legal awareness and law enforcement discretion
The article focuses on the mechanisms of the individual’s legal awareness influence on the quality of law enforcement discretion. The authors analyze the risks that may arise when a range of law enforcement discretion is too wide as well as the possibility of such negative social phenomena as corruption, arbitrariness and abuse of law. The problem of discretion in law is quite complicated and debatable: being a phenomenon that actually exists in law, it paradoxically contradicts the essence of law; moreower, it is very difficult to write discretion into consistent scientific theories. At the same time, the analyzed problem affects the fundamentals of the legal way of regulating public relations. The authors analyze the viewpoints of well-known law schools about the role of discretion in social regulation. They also define connections between related categories such as freedom, subjective right, etc. At the end of the article, it was concluded that the category uniting freedom and discretion is a method or method of legal regulation: a permissible method of legal regulation on the principle "everything that is not prohibited by law is permitted"; a dispositive method of legal regulation, which makes it possible for the subjects to determine their own legal positions in a particular legal case; in the constructions of norms - relatively-definite or alternative prescriptions (used often) and absolutely-definite prescriptions (significantly limited); evaluative concepts that make it possible to expand the scope of discretion; broad interpretation of legal concepts; limiting the scope of government intervention. Key words: law enforcement, law enforcement activity, discretion, law enforcement policy, freedom, subjective right, legal awareness, arbitrariness, abuse of law.