Law-making: issues of form and content

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of issues of the form and content of law-making through the prism of the idea of freedom as the primary basis for the formation and development of socio-normative systems. Emphasis is placed on the predominantly instrumental nature of the understanding of the essence and nature of law-making in modern legal literature. It is substantiated that law is one of the forms of freedom as a process of separating good from evil, the content of which has a moral dimension, not limited by the pragmatic, conventional orientation of the functional influence of officially established legal norms on social relations. At the same time, the idea of human freedom is the general, primary basis for the formation and development of law, morality and religion as necessary socionormative systems in every society; the idea of freedom acts as a basic, fundamental concept for each of them and around it, or rather its concrete understanding within certain temporal and spatial dimensions, a holistic and multi-level system of relevant social values (justice, humanism, equality, good faith, etc.) is developing, which must be coherently and balanced justified, protected and defended within the limits of the specified normative phenomena. The author’s understanding of the concept of «law-making» is offered. Law-making is the activity of authorized bodies and other entities, defined in the legislation, for the planning, development and adoption of a normative legal act with the aim of ensuring legal regulation and/or protection of social relations, the content of which is the official establishment of rules of behavior and activities of people and their associations based on a constitutionally established system of social values, which are substantiated taking into account the objective relationships and interdependencies between the main social regulators operating in society. As a result of research the following conclusions are made: 1. The content of law-making is its main ideas, goals, opinions and positions of its subjects, reality, reproduced at different levels of the consciousness of the rule-maker and embodied in the form of legal norms with different legal force, which fix the models of behavior of the participants of the relevant legal relations, their rights and obligations, the mechanism of their implementation, legal responsibility for their violation, etc. 2. The form of law-making, in contrast to its content, represents its fixed determination, the way of its actual existence, its state or structure. The form of law-making is its internal organization, which includes relevant stages, communications, the procedure for drawing up certain documentation, a system of legal means used in the process of developing and adopting legal acts, etc. The dialectic of the form and content of law-making is manifested in the fact that the form of law-making cannot be outside the context of its defined content, meaning or idea, just as the content of law-making always needs a certain design or organization. Key words: law-making, form and content, freedom, human rights, morality, religion, social values.