Law-Making Regulated by Law in Ukraine

The article traces the main directions of the transition in theoretical discourse on law-making from the Soviet era to the present day, highlighting the historical and methodological foundations of its development. It demonstrates that as a phenomenon of social reality, law-making plays a fundamental role in the development of society, as it is aimed at the creation and improvement of a general, coherent system of legal norms that regulate social relations and have a binding character. Given its historical determinism, the article examines the dynamics of perspectives on the theoretical issues of law-making and the presence of political influence in their formation. Attention is drawn to the issue of continuity in scientific knowledge within law-making research. The statist approach to understanding law-making as an exclusively state-driven activity continues to dominate contemporary Ukrainian legal thought and is even more apparent in everyday legal practice. Although current studies emphasize that the law-making process represents a dual, purposeful activity of civil society and authorized law-making bodies, further analysis of the content of law-making focuses solely on the activity of the latter. The article characterizes methodological approaches to the development of law-making ideas. Attention is also given to the need for a critical rethinking of the positivist approach to the understanding of law-making, which relies solely on formal-dogmatic methods and a scholastic perception of law. It emphasizes the need for an effective, rather than populist, shift toward a natural law methodology and a legal understanding that aligns with the European liberal-democratic model. The legislative regulation of the process of drafting and adopting normative legal acts in Ukraine has a complex and challenging history, which clearly illustrates the difficulties of the country’s transitional transformation. Accordingly, the study analyzes the emergence of legislative definitions of law-making activity and their impact on the further conceptualization and development of the modern model of this activity.