Federal Legislation on Entrepreneurship: its Structure and Regulatory Role

Abstract

Legislation on entrepreneurship at the federal level consists of a tremendous array of laws governing business and legal relationships. The author reveals the "law" category and its content as a specific source of law in economics. The author provides an overview of the views on the place of a law in the system of sources of Soviet economic law and modern business law. The paper differentiates the concepts "a law" and "a source of law", the latter being generic and including all kinds of sources of legal regulation of entrepreneurship at the present stage. The paper concludes that a rule-making competence for business legislation belongs to the joint jurisdiction of the Russian Federation and its constituent entities, reflects constitutional foundation and regional specificity of business relations regulation taking into account geographical, demographic, historical and other peculiarities of the Russian Federation constituent entities. The paper expands the existing system of laws at the federal and regional levels that includes: the Constitution of the Russian Federation, federal constitutional laws, federal laws, constitutions (charters) of constituent entities of the Russian Federation and the laws of the Russian Federation constituent entities. For ease of understanding the system of business laws, the author defines codified and non-codified laws, the latter for the purposes of this research are divided into governing (establishing): the legal status of persons at law; business (economic) activity in general and guarantees of its implementation; specific economic activity (in a certain area); persons at law and their economic activities; a mode of economic activities and obligations under business law. The author draws attention to the balance between institutions, sectors and subsectors of business law. The author criticizes proposals that can be found in domestic jurisprudence for the formation of separate branches of law based on the array of normative rules regulating independent activities (banking, insurance, transport, exchange, etc.) due to the absence of a common general part (general provisions and principles) for such branches of law. In conclusion, the author suggests that we should return to the ideas of codification of federal laws that deal with entrepreneurial activity, namely adoption of the Business Code of Russia.