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Russia belongs to the Continental (Roman-German) legal family. Statutes (laws) are the main source of law.

1.1. The Hierarchy of Legal Acts Regulating Entrepreneurial Activities

The system of legislation of the Russian Federation consists of three levels: federal, regional (at the level of subjects of the Federation), and local (at the level of municipal entities). At the top of the pyramid of normative acts is the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Moreover, the Russian Federation is a party to several binding international treaties.

The Constitution of Russia sets the areas of competence and powers of the federal and regional governmental bodies in its Articles 71–73. Article 71 of the Russian Constitution lists the procedures by which legal acts can be adopted, solely at the federal level. Article 72 of the Constitution describes the areas in which the regulation can be carried out by both regional and federal acts. Meanwhile, the acts of the regional authorities on such matters shall comply with the acts of the federal authorities. The regional authorities “have full power” on matters not listed in the aforementioned two articles (Article 73 of the Russian Constitution).

Currently, no law on normative legal acts has been adopted in Russia, which is common in several countries. Therefore, the legislative system is not fixed in any act in a complete form. However, separate norms establishing the hierarchy of acts are still available in various sources. With regard to such norms, as well as provisions of the jurisprudence, the schematic system of the normative legal acts in Russia can be explained in the following chart.

An act with a lower legal force should not contradict an act with a higher legal force. If such a contradiction arises, the act with a higher legal force shall be applied.[16]

1.2. Requisites of Legal acts

In order to be able to precisely identify a specific legal act, the legal acts shall have the following requisites:[17]

i) The type of a legal act

Main types of legal acts: a federal law, a decree, a decision, an order, a command, an instruction, an informative letter.

ii) Adopting body

An adopting body for federal constitutional laws and federal laws is not specified; only the Parliament of the Russian Federation can adopt these acts. Similarly, an adopting body for regional laws is not specified.

iii) The name

Legal acts do not have official abbreviations in Russia. At the same time, in practice the acts that are widely used acquire informal short names. The short names can appear as abbreviations (for example, FL on Joint Stock Companies is called “FL on JSC”).

iv) The date of adoption

The date of adoption of the federal law is the date of the adoption of the law by the State Duma.

v) The number

Sometimes federal laws are simply named by number, for example "law No. 99-FL". However, this method of naming the law does not allow accurate identification of the law. The issue is that the number 1-FZ is assigned to each law adopted, as the first in a row in the current year. The next law that is adopted is assigned the number 2-FZ, and so on. With this method, since 1993, 21 federal laws were adopted with the number 99-FZ. Therefore, for the unambiguous identification of the law, in addition to the number, it is also necessary to know the date (or at least the year) of its adoption. In practice, for reference on a concrete act, it is recommended to use five requisites at a time: the type of the act, the adopted body, the name, the date of adoption, and the number.

vi) The date of the last amendments (edition)

The date of the last amendments is usually specified in brackets.

vii) The source of official publication

The sources of official publication of the federal laws, the acts of the President of the Russian Federation and the Government of the Russian Federation are:

“The Russian Newspaper”

“The Collection of the Legislation of the Russian Federation”

“The Parliamentary Newspaper”

The official internet portal of legal information, at the following website: pravo.gov.ru

The international treaties within the EEU and decisions of the Eurasian Economic Commission are published on the following website: eaeunion.org

The source of official publication is usually separated from the other requisites with a double backslash. In practice, it is usually not indicated.

The reference on a legal act with the use of all its requisites looks like the following:

The Federal Law dated February 8, 1998 No. 14-FZ (edited on 05.05.2014) "On Limited Liability Companies" // "The Collection of the Legislation of the RF", 16.02.1998, No. 7, page 785.

16

Please see below for a more detailed on the correlation between federal and regional acts.

17

Legal Directory Systems "Consultant Plus" and «Garant» may be used for searching for the texts in Russian of the legal acts of the Russian Federation. The database of these systems is available on the official websites as well: http://www.consultant.ru/online/ and http://www.garant.ru/.