On December 15, 2022, the Department of Theory of Law and the State of the Law Institute of the RUDN University held a scientific and methodological seminar on the Synergistic Approach in State Understanding: Challenges and Development. A wide range of people were involved in the seminar: the faculty of the department, graduate students of the department and students of the Law Institute. The work of the seminar suggested personal and remote presence of the participants and observers.

The purpose of the study is to determine the essence and role of the norms of customary law (customs) through a comprehensive historical-legal and comparative-legal analysis. The methodological basis of the research was such methods of scientific knowledge as: description and comparative-legal method, which enabled to reveal certain types of social norms, their particularities and characteristic features, as well as the historical-legal method and methods of analysis and synthesis. The result of the work was the conclusion that through the prism of customary law norms, the level of development of the state, the degree of independence of society from the state, as well as the state of legal culture is seen on the largest scale. In addition, the author considers a well-reasoned and proven conclusion that it is required to study customary law and customs to modernize legal theory. The work also gives the author’s definition of the category of “custom”: a custom is the established models of human behavior in society, which have developed in the course of their multifold repetition. The novelty of the research lies in the author’s approach to examining the relationship between customs and the theory of law, as well as in the fact that the norms of customary law and the custom appear to be independent and fundamental methods of social regulation in the system of social norms.

The study offers some important insights about the participation of RUDN University Law Institute in the XXI International Scientific and Practical Forum “Legal Technics”. This work aims to contribute to this growing area of research by criticizing the content of the plenary and round-table reports. The study also provides the information on the publication of the proceedings papers in the annual edition “Legal Technics” in 2020.

The article contains an overview of the published textbook “Problems of the theory of state and law”. The publication is devoted to topical and controversial issues in the theory of law and state, contains interesting materials for the study of modern problems of the methodology of legal science, approaches to understanding of law, etc. The textbook will familiarize the readers with the points of view of various authors and their arguments on many issues. The educational publication is a complex work of a team of authors and is intended for a wide range of readers.