Abstract

In the legal doctrine, there is no consensus on the legal nature and the name of the legal prescriptions that do not establish rights, duties and prohibitions. Some legal scholars call them specialized, and refer to the legal norms, other legal scholars call them atypical legal prescriptions, and differentiate them from the rules of law. The article also analyzes the possibility of classifying the entire complex of the studied phenomena as system-determining legal prescriptions. Depending on the function, they can be divided into system-degerming and system-ensuring. This division is critically commented in the article. The concept of “legal prescription” is broader in scope than the “legal norm”, as it includes the rules of law and the rules on the content, operation, and application of the rules of law. The rules on the content, operation and application of the law deserve the name “system-determining legal regulations” because they define the limits of the possible content of the law or determine the choice of law when they compete, allow or block the use of certain rules of law. If a “working” rule of law is hypothetically taken out from legislation, its absence will not affect the content or the possibility of applying other rules of law, and can be, for example, filled in by law analogy. In turn, the removal of a legal prescription from the legislation can «break» the entire branch, subsector or institution of legislation, because either the law will not be «filtered» by content, or unsolvable conflict of laws will arise, or there will be gaps in relation to certain types of legal relationships. System-determining legal prescriptions are divided into those that consist of rules on the content of legal norms, and those that contain rules on the operation and application of the law.