This article examines legal custom as a traditional source of law, identifies its core features and the limits of its applicability in a modern legal order, and demonstrates its significance for the formation and development of the institutions of the law of obligations and entrepreneurial law. The study reviews key doctrinal approaches to distinguishing legal custom from business usages and highlights the role of stable patterns of conduct in securing legal certainty and predictability in civil and commercial transactions. It traces the historical evolution of mechanisms ensuring performance of obligations and liability for breach, as well as the institutionalization of publicity of legally relevant facts, including the emergence of registration mechanisms. Particular attention is given to the impact of cross-border dealings and the procedures for resolving economic and investment disputes on heightened requirements for clear legal standards and good-faith procedural conduct; it is argued that legal custom may be taken into account only where it is provable and does not conflict with mandatory rules, for the sake of the stability of the legal order.
Sergey Nikolaevich Khrameshin (Fri,) studied this question.