The article offers an intellectual reconstruction of significant elements of St. Petersburg school of legal philosophy tradition, present in the theoretical heritage of the Soviet and Russian legal scholar Lev Yavich (1919–2004). The uniqueness of his experience of participation in this tradition is noted: on the one hand, constrained ideological circumstances of the time dictated him to criticize his predecessors in the professorial chair, on the other hand, it is his works paradoxically drew a line of continuity from the ideas of prerevolutionary period to modern. In the legal doctrine of Lev Yavich, tradition as an intellectual reality sui generis, breaking through “over the barriers”, turns out to be stronger than ideological prohibitions and methodological constraints. The authors single out the main body of ideas of the St. Petersburg school, expressing in their totality the idea of the autonomy of law and the notion of the state as a legal phenomenon, and find them in the legal theory of Lev Yavich concealed under a powerful layer of dialectical materialism. Particular attention is paid to the comprehension in his doctrine of the connection between law and justice, the concept and social meaning of subjective rights, as well as the phenomenon of socialist law in the historical evolution of law. The ideas of Lev Yavich are considered both in the context of the tradition of the St. Petersburg school of philosophy and law and in comparison with the early Soviet legal doctrine and the contemporary legal conceptions, in particular with the libertarian theory of law of Vladik Nersesyants