The Community as a Subject of Customary Law among the Perm Peoples in the 18th-19th centuries; Община как субъект обычного права у пермских народов в XVIII–XIX вв.

The community among the Perm peoples in the 18th-19th centuries was a historical and social organism in which social relations were regulated, to a large extent, by the norms of customary law. It not only preserved and passed on customary legal norms from generation to generation, but also served as a guarantor of their implementation, generating the emergence of new patterns of behavior created in everyday practice, enshrined in customary legal norms, and also contributed to their implementation. It influenced the formation of the legal culture and legal consciousness of its members. The study devoted to the community as a subject of customary law among the Perm peoples in the 18th-19th centuries, possessing legal personality, seems to be a relevant phenomenon today. In the chronological period under consideration, the community among the Perm peoples, as a traditional institution and subject of customary law, possessed legal personality, including legal capacity, legal capacity, and tort capacity. Being a single ethno-socio-cultural organism, within which all elements are interconnected and based on ritual-cult, customary-legal, ideological-mythological systems, the community retained local administrative functions throughout the period under study. However, in addition to territorially limited local administrative powers, the community after the reforms of the 60s of the XIX century gradually began to transform from a collective in which elements of democracy were applied, into the lowest level of the state apparatus, acquiring the features of a nominal subject of public relations. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.