The legislation of any country is based on certain sources, or forms of physical expression of the mediated will of the people, resulting in types of regulatory legal acts. Understanding this peculiar pyramid allows you to effectively apply the rule of law to protect the rights of the individual and citizen.
Types of legal acts - general description
Speaking of legal acts, it is worth mentioning in advance what they are. Most jurists tend to define them as an external form of expression of the rule of law - the main “building blocks” of the entire legislative framework. However, the classification of legal sources depends on who creates such basic rules. Accordingly, the types of regulatory legal acts include:
- the law is constitutional and ordinary;
- by-laws and regulations;
- international agreements approved by the relevant authorities of the state.
Each category needs special elaboration for the concept of its essence and place in the pyramid of applicable law.
Law as the highest form of rule of law
Speaking of the law as a socially significant phenomenon, its characterization should be given only on the basis of qualifying features. These include:
- formal expression of the rule of law;
- the rules of law included in this source are developed only using direct or indirect sovereignty. In the first case, the source of the latter is the people, in the second - a special supreme organ of the state (monarch or parliament);
- the rules of law contained in this act are aimed at generalized regulation of relations of a particularly significant nature for society;
- as a source, the law prevails over other forms of expression of law;
- the law is the basis for the development and adoption of other sources of law.
From all this we can deduce that ...
The law is a special source of law, adopted with the help of the supreme body of the state with legislative power, and designed to solve the most significant problems of the country.
Moreover, the law itself has its own varieties - constitutional and regular. The constitutional, as a rule, is aimed at creating and ensuring the functioning of the basic directions of the country's development. Regular law is based on constitutional provisions and is intended to detail them.
By-laws and their types
Effective management of the country's affairs is impossible only with the help of laws. And therefore, lawyers have developed a whole range of additional sources - by-laws. To them in decreasing order of strength include:
- Presidential decrees - depending on the type of government, they are either managerial (for the presidential republic) or regulatory (for parliamentary);
- Government decrees - are designed to solve the problems of implementing the norms of the law in the realities of the current moment and provide quick response to changing situations in the country;
- instructions and orders of the ministries - are of the same nature as the previous type, with one exception - the scope applies only to the authority of the ministry or department;
- local regulations - are adopted in pursuance of legal and by-law sources of law by local authorities of a wide range: from the subjects of the federation to the administrations of cities and villages.
It is worth noting that all by-laws and regulations lose their effect if they come into conflict with the law. However, invalidation can only be carried out by a specialized body, which in most countries is the Constitutional Court.
International regulatory acts and their types
Many jurists argue about whether to include these acts in the "pyramid" of legislation. But with the intensification of diplomatic activities in many areas of the country's management, one cannot reject the significance of the concluded international acts for the legislations of the states that adopted them. This kind of kind includes an international treaty, convention, agreement, having both bilateral and multilateral character. Moreover, all of them, having passed the ratification procedure, are included in the legislative framework of the country and in most cases receive a status above the law.
So, the types of regulatory legal acts make it possible to understand the essence of building legal activity in the country and the possibility of using these sources in jurisprudence.