On legal defects and legal defectology

Introduction: this paper deals with defects in the regulatory part of the legal regulation mechanism as deficiencies in regulatory and legal matter. Commitment to high quality of legal norms and regulatory acts is a prerequisite for the effectiveness of law and the main requirement to lawmaking. Creating legal uncertainty and being a fertile field for the emergence of many negative legal phenomena, regulatory defects should become an independent subject matter of a new scientific area of legal defectology. Purpose: to formulate the concept ‘regulatory legal defect ' taking into account the complexity of defectiveness as a legal phenomenon and its relationship with many other legal categories; to justify the importance of its independent research within the theory of law. Methods: the research is based on the general scientific dialectic approach to cognition of legal defects, which allows for considering this phenomenon in its formation and development as well as in conjunction with related phenomena; other methods applied in course of research include methods offormal logic and specific scientific methods of studying legal reality (formal dogmatic, hermeneutical approach, legal modeling). Results: understanding of regulatory legal defects is in dialectical unity with the concepts ‘quality of law ' and ‘effectiveness of law '. A regulatory legal flaw can be recognized as a defect when it violates the quality standard of law and adversely affects the performance of a legal regulator. Conclusions: the effectiveness of law is influenced by both non-legal factors (political, managerial, financial, social, psychological, ideological) and some legal deficiencies related to defects (restrictions, obstacles, administrative barriers, legislative imbalance, neutralization of law). Regulatory legal defects, mutually determined and interacting with other legal flaws, have their own content and their own conceptual line, reflecting certain shortcomings of the content, form and structure of legal rules and regulatory legal acts.