The role of customs in the system of social norms

RUDN University, Law Institute, Department of Theory of Law and State, Moscow, Russia

¹ Corresponding author: mongush_am@pfur.ru

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to determine the essence and role of the norms of customary law (customs) through a comprehensive historical-legal and comparative-legal analysis. The methodological basis of the research was such methods of scientific knowledge as: description and comparative-legal method, which enabled to reveal certain types of social norms, their particularities and characteristic features, as well as the historical-legal method and methods of analysis and synthesis. The result of the work was the conclusion that through the prism of customary law norms, the level of development of the state, the degree of independence of society from the state, as well as the state of legal culture is seen on the largest scale. In addition, the author considers a well-reasoned and proven conclusion that it is required to study customary law and customs to modernize legal theory. The work also gives the author’s definition of the category of “custom”: a custom is the established models of human behavior in society, which have developed in the course of their multifold repetition. The novelty of the research lies in the author’s approach to examining the relationship between customs and the theory of law, as well as in the fact that the norms of customary law and the custom appear to be independent and fundamental methods of social regulation in the system of social norms.