2 Sources of Socialist Law

1. The party's documents: the unique apex-source — the Communist Party's programme and congress resolutions, formally extra-legal yet practically supreme (the party's directives shaping statutes, judgments and administration); where the party and the state merged (China's party-in-state), the party's normativity is the system's identifying source;2. Legislation (the statutes and codes): the supreme soviets' legislation and the council of ministers' edicts — the formal source-hierarchy's structure (with the constitutional texts' declarative character — rights and duties stated as programme rather than judicial guarantee);3. The plan: the economic plan's quasi-normative force — the binding targets of the enterprise world (contract's subordinate role: contracts implementing the plan — "plan-contract" doctrine; plan breach as the system's delict);4. Case law and legal guidance: the formal rejection of precedent — yet the supreme court's rukovodiashchie ob'iasneniia (guiding explanations) to lower courts functioning as binding interpretation — precedent's unnamed life;5. Doctrine: the ideology's scholarly apparatus (dialectical materialism's legal theory) — not free scholarship but the system's self-description;6. Customary sources: largely displaced — socialist law's hostility to "survivals" (the peasant custom's liquidation; the socialist morality substituting for custom);7. International law: the early non-recognition (the "two camps" doctrine — international law as inter-class struggle) maturing into the socialist states' selective participation (the treaties' pragmatism; the Soviet era's final absorption into the UN-system practice — and modern China's full WTO-era…