Legal methodology is of paramount importance for ensuring a comprehensive research of the civil-law matter, since using the entirety of available methods well-proven in jurisprudence leads to the highest-quality study of each specific area of the civil-law domain. For its part, if conclusions and recommendations which rest upon the civillaw science are taken into account at the legislative level, this makes possible a further improvement in the respective segments of the national civil-law regulation mechanism. Irrespective a rather well-elaborated methodology for interpretation of statutory and regulatory enactments at the level of the instrumental theory of law and the existing academic papers focused on the methods of interpreting contracts, the mechanism for identifying the deep essence of most other acts of self-regulation as a variety of privatelaw texts is not sufficiently developed in civil law. Furthermore, the possibility of using a uniform standard set of methods for understanding of the phenomena existing in civillaw reality, irrespective of the specifics of the subject-matter under research, remains an underexplored issue. This article attempts at substantiating the methodological feasibility of using hermeneutics for scientific research in civil-law science as one of the main methods in the dogmatic area. The authors show that, ideally, modern research in civil-law science should be underpinned by three possible levels of scientific cognition: dogmatic, sociological and axiological. It is demonstrated that the dogmatic level implies a research into the provisions of positive law contained in the acts of civil legislation of Ukraine, the regulations making up the content of legal customs and other sources of civil law, as well as the provisions of contracts, statutes, regulations and other internal documents of legal entities. Their comprehensive study is made using the methods of legal hermeneutics, with due regard for the actual needs for regulation and the will expressed in a legal rule. The authors prove that using the hermeneutical approach to study the civil-law reality allows identifying systemic problems in the organization of legal work of specific participants to relations under civil law, and also to elaborate on the proposals for its improvement and outline the ways to the intended goals through more efficient methods. It is shown that from the perspective of making a research in the civil-law domain, the heuristic potential of this method implies obtaining information about the author’s meaning of a text and about the purposes which the text can be used for. In scientific research, such a result should be intermediate, provide the basis for a scholar’s reflections on legal phenomena and serve as a pretext for identifying problems in the adequacy of presentation of factual circumstances.

List of legal documents 
Legislation 
1. Tsyvilnyi kodeks Ukrainy [Civil Code of Ukraine]: Zakon Ukrainy [the Law of Ukraine] vid 16 sichnia 2003 r. № 435-IV. Vidomosti Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy. 2003. № 40-44. St. 356 (in Ukrainian). 

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