The formation of scientifically based principles and measures for developing the judge's legal awareness should be based on a clear conceptual and categorical apparatus. As we previously discovered during the study of the doctrinal foundations of the development of a judge's professional legal awareness, the key problem at the moment is the lack of a single agreed definition of the concept of a judge's professional legal awareness. To a certain extent, this situation is connected with the lack of clarity on the content of this concept from the norms of judicial law. The article examines the current state of development of the concept of legal awareness in legal research. The shortcomings of applying the current definition of the term legal awareness in the study of the phenomenon of the judge's professional legal awareness in its dynamics are characterized. To form a series of intermediate statements that will ultimately allow characterizing the concept of professional legal awareness of a judge in its entirety: positioning of legal awareness in relation to its bearer; the ability to influence not only the legal reality but also the existence of an individual, a group of individuals, and society in general; attribution to the content of the concept of professional legal awareness of a judge of other auxiliary concepts. The identified debatable aspects require further research into the concept of legal awareness at the levels of the international community, the state, the judiciary, judges and institutions of civil society. Undoubtedly, further in-depth study of international standards will reveal a wider scope of duties that should be assigned to the state, the bodies of the justice system and the judge in the context of ensuring the development of professional legal awareness. However, such research will become possible only after the completion of the theoretical research of the content of the analyzed concept and is connected with the use of empirical methods of legal science.