The article examines classical and contemporary doctrinal approaches to legality as a core phenomenon of legal life. It argues that reducing legality to universal compliance with statutes fails to capture the quality of legislation, overlooks law-making processes, and obscures the connection between legality, the legal order, and the operation of public authority. Competing views that frame legality as a method, a regime, or a principle are reviewed, highlighting their strengths and limitations and the dependence of legality’s content on political conditions and the actual protection of rights and freedoms. The paper proposes to refine the structure of legality through the rule of law, legal certainty, access to justice, effective accountability and oversight, and good-faith application of law. It concludes that legality should be described anew as a stable condition of social order grounded in the quality of legislation, justice, legal culture, and responsible enforcement.
Sergey Nikolaevich Khrameshin (2013) studied this question.