A LEGAL ENTITY AS A PARTICIPANT IN DOMESTIC CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS (the second half of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th century)

The article studies the initial stage in the development of the domestic institute of legal entities – participants of criminal proceedings. In the second half of the 19^th – the beginning of the 20^th century, when the first criminal procedural law was adopted, the Russian legislator attempted to introduce the collective subject of law as an independent participant of criminal proceedings. However, the limitations of the relevant criminal procedural concepts and the lack of special norms revealing the legal nature of the said person led to the application of similar provisions of civil (substantive and procedural) laws in criminal proceedings. In the considered historical period, according to the Criminal Procedure Charter, the participants of criminal proceedings included, alongside physical persons, artificially organized collectives, which for the first time received the official common name of legal persons in the civil legislation in 1906. Despite the normative and legal uncertainty of the criminal procedural status, collective subjects of the law were actually (through authorized persons) involved in criminal proceedings as its participants – guarantors, pledgors, civil plaintiffs or other persons (a prototype of civil defendants). Summarizing the results of the study the author presents the definition of the legal entity as a participant in criminal proceedings of the Russian Empire.