Environmental Protection Law-Making: General Characteristics and Main Development Trends

Environmental protection law-making is a dynamically developing type of sectoral law-making at the national level, which plays a significant role in the process of cognition and legal transformation of interaction between society and nature. It reflects the changing natural and related social, economic and other legally significant realities of the life of Russian society, on the one hand, fixing the achieved level of development of social relationships in the environmental sphere, and on the other — stimulating their modernization in the conditions of solving the problems of transition to sustainable development. Research objectives: to consider the current state of law-making activity in the field of environmental protection in Russia; to identify the main problems of environmental protection law-making at the national level; to show the trends of environmental protection law-making in our country. Research methods: formal-legal, system-structural, methods of legal modeling and intersectoral analysis. Conclusions: 1) the state of legal regulation of environmental protection in modern Russia cannot be considered impeccable, and the quality of law-making activity is high; 2) the key factors constraining the effectiveness of environmental protection law-making are: lack of social consensus on the ratio of environmental and other socially significant interests protected by law; dynamism and low potential for environmental self-regulation; inconsistency in the implementation of state environmental policy; weak scientific security of environmental protection law-making activities; ecological and legal nihilism; 3) the main issue of environmental protection law-making is the choice of an appropriate measure of legal regulation in order to establish environmental law and order and the method of its legal consolidation; 4) the content of the key trends of environmental protection law-making in Russia the principles of environmental protection and environmental goals of sustainable development are predetermined for many decades to come; 5) one of the most stable modern trends in environmental protection lawmaking is the greening of legislation and differentiation of mandatory requirements.