FORUM HIGHLIGHTS LEGAL TRANSFORMATIONS AND THEORETICAL INSIGHTS LECTURE THE LAW OF FORCE AND THE FORCE OF LAW Lecture for the participants of the V St. Petersburg International Legal Forum St. Petersburg, 28 May 2015 By Valery D. Zorkin, President of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, Doctor of Law, Professor Keywords Modern law, law and force, law and power, rule of law, law and state, law and globalization, law and justice, ‘fair law’, human rights, state sovereignty and international law, the Constitution and international law, territorial integrity and self-determination of peoples, Constitutional Court of Russia DOI: 10.17803/2313-5395.2015.2.4.216-241 www.kulawr.ru Volume 2 October 2015 Issue 2(4) Valery D. Zorkin The Law of Force and the Force of Law T 217 he issue of correlation between law and force is crucial for the entire legal thought and practice. <...> Not only the destiny of individual states, but the destiny of the whole humanity as a civilization of law, depends on the way it is resolved. <...> This problem has acquired particular significance and acuteness in the present ‘age of global changes’. <...> Thereby it creates not only a ground for a great number of legal collisions, but also regular situations when intrastate and global processes are out of any legal field. <...> Globalization, as any significant phenomenon of social life, has positive and negative aspects. <...> And the others cynically try to use this ‘fragility of being’ in their own interests. <...> These transformations of national and global reality as well as of the new political language of its description — let us honestly recognize it – caused a certain ‘conceptual shock’ among a significant number of Volume 2 October 2015 Issue 2(4) www.kulawr.ru 218 KUTAFIN UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW law scholars, since no current legal doctrines had a relevant conceptual framework for researching this ‘turbulent-chaotic reality’. <...> We should not say that the world juridical community did not react to this situation. <...> I would not blame the world juridical community for such conservative way of thinking, first of all, because lawyers by virtue of specificity of their social role are obliged to be conservative. <...> And, finally, juridical community of one or another country is always <...>