Approaches to the Study of Legal Regulation
The paper analyses the issues of legal regulation that amounts to one of the fundamental categories of the general theory of law. Changes that have been taking place in Russia over the past two decades in different spheres of social life in general and in the sphere of state government and law in particular, and the needs of modern judicial practice constituting the challenges that the legal science must accept, determine the necessity to reconsider certain provisions of the theory of legal regulation. In addition, the change of scientific paradigm at the end of the 20th century in social sciences and humanities resulted in reconsideration of methodological repertoire of both the general theory of law and branches of law. The author addresses a number of methodological approaches (systematic, tiered, interdisciplinary, activity) employed in studying legal regulation. When studying legal phenomena and procedures (in particular, the mechanism of legal regulation, rights implementation, legal awareness, functions of law, a system of law, etc. ) some authors use methodological tools of the tiered approach. The author draws a conclusion with regard to the usefulness of studying different types of legal regulation that allows studying them as unique "levels" of its structural organization. Law regulation activity is being carried out at two main levels: unilateral state authority and independent (contractual), when each of the levels has qualitative uniqueness of subjects, objects and regulatory activity Some scholars justify heuristic capabilities of the interdisciplinary approach. Despite ambiguity of interpretations (by virtue of a semantic term potential in social sciences and humanities) in the scientific repertoire of jurisprudence, multidisciplinary (more precisely, interdisciplinary) nature of legal regulation is obvious, which allows to employ it, for example, to determine peculiarities of contractual regulation of private law and public law relations. The analysis of methodological approaches used to study how certain aspects of legal regulation (object, method, mechanism, etc.), and to carry out an integrated examination of legal regulation allows to draw a conclusion about usefulness of the activity approach in understanding the phenomenon of the state legal reality. The activity approach encourages systematization of fragmentary awareness of the legal regulation activity, reveals new facets of legal regulation, as well as to address a number of practical tasks within the scope of the law.