Understanding law-making and Norm-making in the Context of the Draft Law «Оn law-making Activities»

Abstract

The article examines the concepts of law-making and rule-making in accordance with the draft law of Ukraine «On Law-Making Activity». Attention is drawn to the fact that the law-making form of legal activity occupies an important place among other forms of legal activity and plays an important role in the implementation of state functions, gives them a normative definition and forms a normative basis for their life activities.

It was noted that law-making activity, as one of the main functions of public authorities, has been in dire need of complex regulatory regulation at the level of law since Ukraine gained independence. Repeated unsuccessful attempts to adopt a law on normative legal acts, attempts to regulate the issue of planning law-making activities, to ensure proper control mechanisms for the specified activities, were exposed to the legislator's inability to form a politically agreed position, which led to fundamental gaps in the field of legislative regulation of law-making.

However, in 2021, people's deputies developed a draft law «On law-making activity», which regulates in detail the terminological base and the mechanism of adoption of normative legal acts in Ukraine, which significantly changes the approach to law-making. The main goal of this draft law is to establish and standardize the issue of normative and law-making activities. It is designed to regulate issues of law-making activity in Ukraine, in particular, activities and regulation of relations related to its planning, development, adoption (issuance), application of normative legal acts and legal monitoring. One of its key features is the definition of the rules of the hierarchy of normative legal acts.

It is noted that in the legal literature more attention is paid to the concept of «normative activity». In the draft law, the concepts of law-making and rule-making are clearly distinguished, adding to law-making, in addition to rule-making, «planning»: «Law-making activity is the activity of planning, developing a draft of a normative-legal act (its concept) and adopting (issuing) a normative-legal act, the purpose of which there is legal regulation and/or protection of social relations». In view of this, an own opinion on this issue was expressed and the author's definition of law-making was formulated.