The common law as a regulator of the Mongol-Turkic peoples' social relations in Central Asia during Chenghis Khan's reign

The expression "sources of the law" in the literature has many meanings. After a review of the literature, we made a conclusion that it is the external form of the rules of law which regulate public relationships in certain branches of law. Having separate sources of the law is always considered as a mandatory feature of a branch of law independence. According to this, there are four basic forms of law (sources of the law) that can be classified: 1. The custom. Some scientists think that the custom plays a key role among other sources. On the contrary, legal positivism considers that customs do not have practical application nowadays and should be considered obsolete. 2. The precedent. The precedent is the most common source of the law. It is the regulator of judgments and administrative decisions for specific cases for which the state gives statutory parameters. 3. The government regulation. This source is a very important one because it includes obligatory rules of behavior which are under government control and protection. 4. The international agreement. The main peculiarity of the international agreement is that it has a prior validity to domestic law. The Common Law was in written form, which proves that it is not a custom, but a statute of law that regulates public relationships such as penal, civil and military law. The Common Law developed by adding new laws and rules that could be changed or canceled. But all laws were codified and under state protection. The Common Law as a regulator of the Mongol-Turkic peoples' social relations has a peculiarity: it regulated laws of nomads who lived separately on a big territory and had no common language culture. We should agree with the authors who say that the Common Law is the oldest source of the law and that is why recently it has attracted attention of different scientists. They use different terms to define the Common Law: informal law, early law, preliminary law, etc. But these terms were not good enough because did not contain all functions of the Common Law. That is why the Common Law was not researched enough in the juridical literature and is not well known in legal science. The Common Law cannot be called the law source nowadays because: - the statues of the Common Law were not clear enough and could not fully regulate public relationships; - the statues of the Common Law could not be used equally on the whole territory of the Mongolian state, they were different for every tribe according to the tribe's culture; - the Common Law had to be used by several generations to be effective; - the local Common Law did not always comply with the interests of the state. We can make a conclusion that the Common Law and the custom are not the same because the Common Law is a transient phase from custom to law. However, the Common Law could not be separate from customs which nomad people had because during the early period of feudal society the majority of the population was illiterate. That is why customs still exist as a source of the law while the Common Law was replaced by the law as we understand it nowadays.

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