The official-official expression of the state’s will in the law, documentary, the requirement of clarity and accuracy of the formulation of requirements stipulate the need to use strictly defined, unified forms, formal details and specific structural parts in it. Formal details are mandatory elements of any normative act. They indicate its official nature, legal force. By the details you can find out which body and when it issued this law, in what form embodied it.
Law structure: concept
There is a certain set of elements that must be present in any regulatory act. This set forms the structure of the law.
In the Russian Federation, the adoption of regulatory acts is the responsibility of representative bodies of power. The most important legislative body is the State Duma. Representative institutions of power operate in each subject and municipality. When issuing laws, these bodies use the required details:
- The name of the type of regulatory act. This may be a federal law, a federal constitutional law, a subject’s law, etc.
- Heading. This is not only a mandatory formal requisite, but also an element of the search image of a normative act. The title indicates the subject of regulation, reflects the scope of the law, the choice of regulatory material. The title is the most important systematization tool.
- The official text. It indicates the name of the state (public entity) on behalf of which the law is issued.
- Date of adoption.
Preamble
It is also called conducting. This is an independent element of the structure of the law. The preamble is the most important addition to the normative part of the document. The introduction is not divided into separate articles and parts. As a rule, it reflects the tasks and goals of adopting the law.
The preamble allows a deeper, clearer understanding of the meaning, essence, and appropriateness of a normative act. Of particular importance is the introduction in the structure of social laws. The preamble in such normative acts characterizes the socio-political conditions that prompted them to accept.
Rubrication
If a complex, voluminous law is adopted, parts, sections, chapters, subsections, etc. are introduced into the structure.
The internal rubrication of regulatory acts is based on material grounds. The division of public relations, regulated by the rules of law, into certain areas in accordance with the content and nature reflects the internal structure of the industry or sub-sector of the legislation or legal institution. Accordingly, the closer the structure of the law (federal, regional or local) is to the legislative system as a whole, the more effectively it will serve to systematize and streamline legal relations in the state.
It is worth saying that the practice of applying rubrication in Russia has not yet been fully established. As a rule, in a single-stage structure, laws are divided only into chapters. There are, of course, multi-level normative acts in the system: Civil Code, Insurance Code, etc. They are divided into sections, chapters.
Some constitutions of the republics that make up the Russian Federation consist only of chapters. But in most republics, a double heading system is included in the structure of the basic law - they are divided into sections, and they are divided into chapters. According to this principle, constitutions of Bashkortostan, Karelia, Tatarstan and several other republics were drawn up.
Article
It is considered a key element in the structure of the law.
In domestic rule-making practice, legal acts are not drawn up in solid text. It always highlights certain parts.
Structurally, a normative act is divided into articles - a kind of document cell. This greatly facilitates both the interpretation and application of the provisions. In addition, line-by-line separation allows you to use links to individual parts of a legal document, and helps to systematize.
The article contains a legal norm - a state-imperious command, an order binding upon execution. She expresses the idea in its entirety. It seems inappropriate and unjustified to include in one article norms that do not have a direct relationship with each other. X can well be placed in different parts of the act without prejudice to their content. Artificially reducing the number of articles in legal documents by combining heterogeneous norms leads to their heap, creates problems in interpretation and application. In addition, the key condition for the formation of the structure of the article is violated - the connection and unity of the provisions enshrined in it are destroyed. Certain inconveniences arise during systematization. The fact is that an article that contains dissimilar provisions must be placed in various parts of collections (codes) in accordance with their content and nature.
If several norms have a close relationship with each other, mutually determine and complement each other and only collectively answer a certain question, if one provision cannot be understood without another, they can be placed in one article.
Notes
They are often used in the structure of articles. Meanwhile, often notes only clutter up, confuse laws. Their excessive number negatively affects the structure of the normative act. According to experts, most of the notes could be made independent articles. They can also be included directly in the text of the norm to which they are given.
In the domestic system of legislation there are examples where legal prescriptions are set out as notes.
Numbering
In all laws, all articles have their own number. For convenience, an end-to-end system is used. It is perfect for everyone, including volumetric and multi-stage laws. In domestic practice, Arabic numerals are used, since they are more convenient for recognition than Roman ones (especially if there are a lot of articles in the law).
Chapters, sections and other structural divisions of a normative act are also numbered. Such numbering greatly facilitates the search for the desired position, allows you to specify links to certain prescriptions.
"General Provisions"
When developing and subsequently adopting any normative act, legislators always strive to place at its beginning, among the first provisions, the most fundamental, general moments of legal regulation, norms that apply to all parties and aspects of the issue considered in the law. Thus, the "General Provisions" are created. In many codification acts (codes) they are combined in the "General Part".
The creation of this block ensures the brevity, compactness of the presentation of the material, the relationship of the provisions placed in the document, avoids unjustified repetitions.