At present lawmaking activity as one of the main functions of public authorities requires comprehensive normative regulation. Numerous ill-fated attempts to enact the Law on Normative-legal Acts have not allowed to appropriately regulate the issues of planning of lawmaking activity, its effective implementation. Although a draft Law on lawmaking activity was approved, which defines the content and procedures of lawmaking activity, establishes its principles, participants, and their powers. However, the precondition for the effectiveness of this draft law is the development of one of the key problems of this matter, namely the form and content of the law, their specificity, and characteristics of the correlation in terms of the basic concepts of legal thinking.

The purpose of the article is to review the main concepts and approaches to the content and form of law in the context of the tasks of lawmaking and law enforcement. The integrative vision of law has been established as a response to the excessive differentiation of legal knowledge, which entailed critical incompatibility between the mainstreams of legal thought – the theories of natural and positive law, historical and sociological schools of law. The integrative approach to law proceeds from the understanding that no separate conceptual idea is capable of fully reflecting law as a social phenomenon and therefore cannot aspire to unconditional verity or absolute objectivity. Simultaneously, each such theory, reflecting its separate significant characteristics, allows us to combine them and reflect in this way a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, that is law. This emphasis implies the assessment of law simultaneously as justice (natural law), as coercive influence (positive law), and as a method of overcoming and preventing social conflicts (sociological school of law).

It is concluded that law should be seen as existing and functioning at a minimum in these forms – consciousness, texts, and behavior. Law in consciousness represents theories and concepts that act as the ideological foundations of law formation and law enforcement. Law in texts objectifies its content, serves its certainty – the uniform understanding and application of legal norms. Law in action means law realization in practical life that is the expected result of legal regulation.

Bibliography

Edited and translated books

1. Erlikh O. Osnovopolozheniye sotsiologii prava (Grafskiy V, Grevtsov Yu red per s nem, Univer izdat Konsortsium 2011) (in Russian).

2. Kheffe O. Politika. pravo. spravedlivost. Osnovopolozheniya kriticheskoy filosofii prava i gosudarstva (Malakhova V per, Gnozis 1994) (in Russian).

3. Khart Kh L A. Kontseptsiya prava (per s angl, Sfera 1998) (in Russian).

 4. Feinberh Dzh, Koulmen Dzh (red), Filosofiia prava (per z anhl, Vyd-vo Solomii Pavlychko “Osnovy” 2007) (in Ukrainian).

 5. Berzhel Zh-L, Obshchaya teoriya prava (Danilenko V red, per s fr, NOTA BENE 2000) (in Russian).