Legal custom is a phenomenon that hasbeen poorly studied in modern Russian social science. Recognising custom as one of its sources, the Russian legal system puts it at the end of the following hierarchy: law - other normative acts - normative contract - custom. (This is also true for a number of other legal systems, such as the Romano-Germanic one.) This situation developed in the twentieth century, when legal customs were actually replaced by positive law under the slogan of fighting the remnants of feudal and bourgeois law.

However, over the past 10-20 years, interest in legal customs has grown to a certain extent. This is partly due to the increased attention to the conditions of ethno-cultural and ethno-confessional groups' and communities' lives, the requirement to observe the principles of plurality and diversity of cultures in modern society. This situation is also typical for both Russia and Western Europe. For example, European authorities are forcing EU member states to take better account of their regional and minority languages. To this end, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages was adopted in 1992. The document is not always considered unambiguous but it has already had a number of legal consequences. ‘In order to promote the use of these languages in legal, administrative, economic and cultural life, without competing with the use of official languages, this Charter provides for a long series of actions, the most notable of which are the following ones: recognition of bilingual schools and topographical designations in two (if not more) languages’¹. It is obvious that the spread of this influence on administrative activities or business practices is fraught with serious bureaucratic costs. That is why European legislators have provided for a long series of actions, which G. L. Ott writes about.

In addition, the last 20 years have been characterised byinterdisciplinary research, the object of which is legal relations, in the context of the national and cultural landscape. They are referred to as legal anthropology², or normative ethnography. Why, in this case, are normative cultural studies impossible?Of course, this sounds like a tautology, because the science of culture is concerned with the study of social norms. We will assume that in this case we are talking about that part of the rules which is authorised, in one form or another, by the state.