Law Making

activity by the state designed to manage society through legislative instruments, which are generally binding rules (legal norms) that express the will of the ruling class. Law making comprises the establishment of new legal norms as well as the amendment and repeal of existing ones. The preliminary stages of law making include identifying the need for legal regulation, summarizing the effects of existing legislation, and analyzing economic, sociological, and other data. The preliminary stages of law making also involve determining the goals and selecting the method of legal regulation, drafting the legislative instrument, and obtaining the argument of interested bodies. The principal states of law making are passage of the draft of the legal instrument by the appropriate lawmaking body and the instrument’s attainment of the legal force of operative law.

In the USSR, law making is exclusively the prerogative of the state. The Constitution of the USSR specifies the range of lawmaking bodies, their competence, and the types of instruments they issue, such as laws, edicts, and decrees.