Legal Frontier in the Regulation of Cross-Border Public Relations

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. When it comes to regulating cross-border relations, the rules of law of a given state, foreign national laws and international legal norms are/may all be applicable. In their entirety, these norms form a sort of buffer zone between existing legal systems, i.e. create a legal phenomenon that can be called a legal frontier. It is within the framework of this frontier that numerous legal phenomena occur, with the very concept of their existence in recent years being either challenged or blatantly denied.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The provisions of international treaties, the national legislation of Russia and other states, as well as numerous works of Russian and foreign researchers were used as materials for this study. The study relies on the general scientific and special methods as its methodological foundation.RESEARCH RESULTS. The study found that foreign laws do not coincide, applying them to regulate crossborder relations leads to cases where relations of the same category are managed differently even within a single state. All known sources of law serve as the generators of norms that govern cross-border relations, which is not the case for either domestic or international interstate relations. Additionally, new sources of international legal norms have emerged and their objective is to regulate cross-border public relations not specified in Art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. The article states that significant changes in the theory of general international law (as well as in the general theory of law) are caused by the emergence of self-executing international legal norms designed to regulate cross-border social relations specifically.DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. The author comes to the conclusion that the emergence of self-executing international legal norms required a change in the very definition of international law, admitting the impossibility of the existence of any universal theory of the relationship between international and national law, as well as specifying the nature of the object and subject of an international treaty. The use of self-executing international legal norms as regulators of crossborder public relations does not transform these relations into international interstate relations and does not turn their subjects into subjects of international law. These relations remain as cross-border relations, and their subjects have an exclusively cross-border legal standing, regardless of which legal system norm was responsible for regulating them.