A defining feature of Kistiakivskyi's work was his desire to establish the nature of existing legal institutions and to identify effective mechanisms for their use for the benefit of society. His undoubted achievement is that he was one of the first in the national science to study law as a social phenomenon and consistently introduced an historical and sociological approach to legal research. The scholar defended, in particular, democratic views on the objectives of criminal punishment, and was one of the first in the national science to draw attention to the need to abolish the death penalty. Nowadays, when a certain part of our society is faced with the problem of choosing ways and methods of defending their rights, when ultra-liberal attitudes have spread among a significant number of intellectuals, it is worth taking a close look at the problem of political radicalism through the eyes of one of the prominent representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia of the second half of the nineteenth century - Oleksandr Kistiakivskyi.

judicial reform; Oleksandr Kistiakivskyi