One of the most mysterious and poorly understood norms of customary law (adata ) Ishkil remains in the North-Eastern Caucasus. It has long attracted the attention of scientists. Materials about the Dagestani Ishkil were collected in the 19th century by the famous Russian legal historians M. M. Kovalevsky and PHI. Leontovich. In Soviet times , historians, ethnographers and lawyers wrote about Ishkil more than once. But no one went beyond the general statement of the question and did not even give a detailed description of this custom. In addition, scientists were mainly interested in the social content and origins of ishkil, rather than its legal forms. This work is the first attempt to analyze ishkil as a changing customary law practice in the historical context of the era of the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus in the XVIII-XIX centuries, from which most of the Arabic documentary sources about Ishkil1 have come down . For readers familiar with the latest studies on customary law, the title of the article may evoke an association with a series of works about the baranth in the Kazakh steppe by the contemporary American historian Victoria Martin [Martin , 1997 , p. 249-270; Martin , 2001 , p. 140-155] 2 . This was done intentionally. The history of Ishkil and Baranta has a lot in common. In addition, my approach is close to the Martin method. At the same time, I did not try to translate for Dagestan the model of transformation of customary law into a colonial empire proposed by an American researcher. On the contrary , in the case of Ishkil, I wanted to show the reader that the course of development of customary law in the Caucasus Mountains did not necessarily follow the path it took in the Kazakh steppe. The legal reality and politics of the empire on its eastern fringes were much more mosaic than is usually thought. The chosen angle allowed me to touch on several riddles related to Ishkil in Dagestan. It has not yet been determined that this is a crime , 1 T ... Read more