When studying local regulatory acts, we are faced with the question of what branch of law they belong to. Depending on the subject of a particular study, local acts can be considered as sources of norms of administrative, civil, labor, corporate law. This leads to completely different interpretations of the concept of “local legal act”. The difficulty is that in today’s study of local acts there is almost no continuity with the studies of the previous period, because not only the concept, but also the very essence of this phenomenon in the Soviet period was significantly different from the modern one. At the same time, it is equally wrong to both reproduce uncritically the old theoretical constructions and completely reject them. As a result, rather contradictory and controversial approaches to the concept of “local legal acts” may arise. The article explores modern interpretations of the concept of “local regulatory legal act” in order to reveal the boundaries of the use of this term and the range of phenomena they cover. An analysis of possible interpretations of this concept from the standpoint of various concepts of legal thinking (sociological, natural law, positivist) allows us to conclude that the legal nature of local regulatory legal acts can be substantiated within the framework of all the existing concepts. In addition to conceptual ideas about law, the specificity of possible approaches to the concept of local acts may be due to the peculiarities of the legal branch from which the research is conducted (labor law, civil law, administrative law, municipal law). Using the formal legal and logical methods, the author analyzes each of the existing approaches, showing that today a comprehensive study of the system of local regulatory acts is possible only from the perspective of a general theory of law. It is the general theoretical approach that allows us to cover all varieties of local acts, revealing the signs that unite their various categories. The author substantiates the use of the term “local regulatory legal acts” (internal acts of the organization that regulate the behavior of its members) as a generic one. “Corporate normative legal acts” are considered as a kind of local acts. As for the municipal acts, they completely do not coincide with the local ones, because their action extends not to the members of the organization, but to all those who are on the territory of the municipality 
For citation: Davydova M.L. Local regulatory legal acts: terminological discussions. Law. Journal of the Higher School of Economics. 2021, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 4–24. (In Russ.). DOI: 10.17323/2072-8166.2021.4.4.24