“Dissertation case” by Alexander Mikhailovich Ladyzhensky

The article is devoted to an unusual scientific story, an episode of the scientific biography of Alexander Mikhailovich Ladyzhensky, an outstanding Soviet legal scholar, historian of state and law, legal theorist, and international scholar. He had to defend his thesis twice for the degree of Doctor of Law on the topic “The adats of the highlanders of the North Caucasus”, and both times he defended his thesis successfully. The course and results of the defense were influenced by political and ideological factors, including even Stalin’s own attitude to the topic of the dissertation. The narrative of the first (at the USSR Prosecutor’s Office Law Institute) in 1941 and the second (at the USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Law) in 1947 defenses is based on original archival documents studied by the author in eight archival repositories in Moscow and Rostov-on-Don, the vast majority of which are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.