Smart Regulation as the Basis for Improving Modern Law-Making
Many of the modern law-making procedures (regulatory impact assessment, actual impact assessment, legal monitoring, etc.) and technologies (such as regulatory sandboxes) are commonly considered today as elements of “smart” regulation. Despite the active use of this concept in a modern law-making practice and academic research, its essence and differences from traditional legal regulation doesn't remain completely clear. The purpose of the study is to determine the content and characteristics of smart regulation. This involves the following tasks: a study of the formation of this concept; a comparative analysis of conceptual approaches that have been consistently developed over the past few decades in states that are purposefully improving the traditional mechanism of lawmaking; analysis of regulatory tools used in the framework of smart regulation. The research is conducted through analytical, comparative legal, prognostic methods. The results of the study allow one to conclude that smart regulation includes the recommendations of previously emerging approaches such as less and better regulation. The specificity of the concept under consideration is that, using most of the provisions of the previous ones, it shifts the emphasis from the regulatory process to its result, focusing on achieving maximum effect in the least resourceconsuming way. The term “smart” as applied to technical devices is used when at a lower cost it is possible to discover new, previously inaccessible opportunities. Such an interpretation applies to legal regulation. At the macro level, this involves the identification of all possible decision centers and the inclusion of the most influential of them in the regulatory process. At the micro level, a search is underway for tools that can specifically and most effectively solve the problem. In addition to purely legal means, social, psychological, economic mechanisms of influence can be used here. The development of appropriate tools is carried out, in particular, on the basis of modern achievements in behavioral sciences, which allows us to predict the emergence of legal regulation to a new level, concealing both advantages and risks.