Financial Law

in the USSR and other socialist countries, the branch of law that regulates social relationships arising from the state’s financial activities. The involvement of the state in finances was increased by the transfer of the basic means of production to state ownership and by the state’s assumption of direct administration of economic and sociocultural construction. The state has at its disposal a large share of the national income, more than half of which is handled by the state budget. By means of the budget and other institutions of the financial system, the state ensures the planned accumulation, distribution, and use of monetary assets and the systematic supervision of finances.

Financial activity is a particular type of activity in the exercise of state power and state administration and is regulated as a whole by the norms of administrative and state law. Financial law has been separated from these branches of law and made into an independent branch because of the specific nature of the subject of the relationships regulated and because of the scale and significance of financial legislation. At the same time, the principles and general provisions of administrative and state law apply to these relationships. Financial law applies only to those financial relationships that are of an organizational nature; those based on contracts are regulated by civil law. For example, financial law covers questions of the organization of banking and the system of accounts but does not apply to relationships between bank institutions and recipients of credit or between clients settling accounts.

The principal institutions of financial law are budget law, the legal regulation of state incomes and state expenditures, foreign-exchange legislation, and the legal bases of the organization of credit, accounting, and money circulation.

In capitalist countries, including prerevolutionary Russia, attempts were made to structure financial law as a separate branch of law, but the success of these attempts was far from universal. In a number of bourgeois states the legal norms relating to the financial activity of the state are considered to be norms of state law (constitutional law) on the one hand and of administrative law on the other.