ALTERNATIVE AS A SCIENTIFIC-LEGAL CATEGORY

Despite its frequent and active use both by the legislator and the scientific community, the category of an alternative is little developed and researched. However, current legal reality causes the necessity of carrying out such scientific research what is associated with the rather frequent use of an alternative in the current statutory provisions. The research covers the study of an alternative as an integral scientific-legal category from the theoretical and legal perspectives in order to determine the concept of an alternative and identify its attributes. The authors reviewed the current legislation where the legislator uses the alternative as a legal technique when constructing a standard of law in some cases and as its semantic meaning - in other cases. In general, the alternative is applied in constitutional, civil, criminal, procedural, and other branches of law; one can find the alternative, i. e. a situation where the choice is given, in almost every normative legal act. Despite the scientific research of some types of alternative in law, the alternative as an independent scientific-legal category remains without due attention of the scientific community. The paper gives the review of the opinions of scientists on this issue, investigates the etymological, philosophical, and logical meaning of the category of an alternative. The authors identified the attributes of an alternative (free or mandatory choice, achievement of an objective with the best result, two or more options for the subject of choice characterized by the normativity and mutual elimination, and orthographic features) considering which the authors proposed the formulation of its definition making no pretense of its finality.