The Code of Local Laws of the Western Provinces of 1837 as the monument of municipal law of Ukraine

Abstract

It is established that the Code of Local Laws of the Western Provinces of 1837 (the Code of 1837), the draft of which has beenprepared by the Second Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery was to be the codified collection of local law for Kyiv,Volyn and Podil Provinces in the 1830s. However, in 1838 the concept of expanding the all-Russian system of legislation to allprovinces strengthened, so the fully prepared Code of 1837 did not come into force, but it was used as a manual for legal scholars andpractitioners.It is established that the sources for the Code of 1837 were the norms of Ukrainian customary law; privileges, regulations, constitutionsof Lithuanian and Polish law; universals and instructions of the hetmans; nominal and senate decrees of the Russian autho -rities; decrees of judicial practice of Ukrainian state, statutory and town courts. In theoretical and legal comparison with other collectionsof legislative acts of that time, the structure of the Code of 1837 is quite clear and at the same time branched out, namely it consistsof: Introduction; Part I “Laws on estates”; Part II “Civil laws”; Part III “Laws on judicial rites, on court proceedings, and on measuresof civil penalties”; Annexes. Each of the books was divided into sections, subsections, chapters, and paragraphs with footnotes. Legalnorms concerning town (municipal) law were mostly concentrated in Section III (Book I Part I) “On townspeople”, Subsection III(Book II Part I Section II) “On acts of the estate of townspeople” and Section III (Book II Part I) “On special acts of the estate of townspeopleand countrypeople”.It is noted that in the first half of 19th century norms of town law regulated not only the activities of town self-government, butalso determined the rights and duties of a particular townee estate, their belonging to the town community, which were concentrated inthe Code of 1837. Having analyzed the content of the main provisions of the town law of the Code of 1837, it should be noted that acertain number of its paragraphs have a blanket way of formulating. In the Code of 1837, the codifiers technically used the referenceto the articles of the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire of 1832. The peculiarity of the regulations of the Code of 1837 was the establishmentof concepts of citizens of western provinces and of free people as townspeople in its text. An important feature of the provisionsof the Code of 1837 also concerned such a category of townspeople as honorary citizens of the western provinces. The norms ofmunicipal law of the Code of 1837 did not contradict the main source of municipal self-government for Ukrainian towns in the firsthalf of the 19th century, that is the Charter on the Rights and Benefits of the cities of the Russian Empire of 21 April 1785. The Codeof 1837 preserved its practical significance even at the beginning of the 20th century where it came to legal relations having arisenbefore the 1840s, and, accordingly, were subject to the local laws of that time.