Institutionalization of legal expertise of regulatory acts as a sign of stable legal practice

The present article is devoted to researching the issue of the institutionalization of legal expertise of regulatory acts as an emerging legal practice in contemporary Russian law. The author examines the institutionalization of legal expertise as a significant characteristic of its formation as a practice, analyzes the current state of the expert community, and characterizes existing expert institutions, their legal and factual status. Special attention is paid in the article to the models of organization of the expert community applied both in Russia (including at the level of the subjects of the Russian Federation) and abroad. The study explores the diverse experiences of institutionalization of legal expertise in the post-Soviet space (Belarus and Kazakhstan), in European countries (France, Poland, etc.), and in other countries (in particular, Canada, Vietnam). The article employs a methodological toolkit traditional for legal research, including general scientific methods of cognition such as analysis and synthesis, the method of systems analysis, as well as special methods – formal-legal and comparative-legal. The novelty of the research lies in establishing a connection between the institutionalization of legal expertise and its framing as a stable legal practice, i.e., the systematic activity of subjects (including public authorities, scientific organizations, and individual experts) consisting of regularly repeated procedures for researching and evaluating legal acts. Based on the analysis of sources, including foreign practices, the author classifies models of organizing the expert community and shows that institutionalization serves as a sign of the formation of the practice of legal expertise. The article also notes that the emergence of the expert community as a subject of legal expertise raises a number of organizational issues related to the status of experts, the limits of their freedom and independence, the legal nature of expert conclusions, and the scientific and methodological support for their activities, the resolution of which could facilitate the final establishment of the practice and institution of legal expertise.