Генезис юридической силы: значение формального источника права

Abstract

The article is devoted to the issue of the origin of a fundamental phenomenon for legal science and practice – legal force, which both the outer shells of normative texts (regulatory legal acts, normative contracts and other forms of objective law) have, and the legal norms themselves as generally binding rules of social interaction. The issues of formation and subsequent action of the category of «legal force» are considered from the standpoint of the embodiment of this category in the carriers of regulatory legal information – legal norms that need stable outer shells (formal sources of law). The author determines the methodological significance of the impact of the future formal source of law to genesis and the subsequent implementation of legal force as an abstract category of the legal system. Particular attention is drawn to the reflection of the significance of legal force through the prism of the property of universal validity in formal sources of law. The author establishes that the category of «legal force» may exist before the formation of a specific outer shell (form) of legal regulation, however, for its practical action, it fundamentally needs it. The fundamental distinction between the legal force possessed by the norms of law and the formal power possessed by formal sources of law (mainly normative legal acts expressing the state will) in the question of the genesis of the category «legal force» is associated with the distinction between methods for their determination and subsequent practical application. In this sense, the importance of the difference in the legal force of legal norms, the normative force of individual legal acts and the public power of legal documents is emphasized. The article provides examples from modern theoretical and legal literature, substantiating the need to study the category of «legal force» in the context of formal sources of law. The views of classical and modern authors in relation to the categories «legal force» and «source of law» are analyzed, the origin and content of the category «legal force» are clarified. Conclusions are drawn about the fundamental importance of the factors that determine the genesis of the category «legal force» and the sign of the general obligatory nature of objective law; an objective period of time is established for the emergence of the legal force of the norms of law and formal sources of law as their outer shells. The existence of legal force for the norms of law, systematically fixed in the normative text (formal source of law), is determined.