Civil legal regulation of abuse of a right in judicial practice

The subjects of civil law relations are vested with the right to choose a model of their lawful behavior to such an extent that judicial practice encounters the problems caused by the adverse consequences of such behavior, which are significant and tangible for both the counterparty and the third parties expecting their legal rights and interests to be respected. In this study, the author was interested in a practical approach to understanding the abuse of a right developed by judicial practice, because the norms of civil legislation on the effectuation of civil rights are presented in not such a broad interpretation, as the law enforcer would like. Within this study, the author investigated various judicial positions on the qualification of specific behavior of participants in civil law relations as “abuse of a right”. In order the adverse consequences of the abuse of a right for the parties to legal relations and third parties to be eliminated or not to occur at all, the law establishes a general rule on the extent of equitable civil right effectuation. This rule is directly related to the concept of abuse of a right and instructs the participants in civil relations to prevent its knowingly unfair effectuation. As part of the analysis of the judicial practice materials, the author identified the criteria (signs) that courts are guided by to establish the fact of abuse of a right. As a result of the analysis of the criteria (signs) of abuse of a right developed by judicial practice, it was concluded that, to some extent, the subjective-evaluative approach of the court to characterizing the specific circumstances of a case allows currently to talk about a certain spontaneous nature of the choice of position by the court to consider the specific behavior of a person as the abuse of a right or not.