On the question of the functions and tasks of legal custom

The article researches the functions and tasks of legal custom based on historical experience and the current state of legal life.The view represents that law and culture functions are realized through legal custom, as it is an important element of these phenomena.At the same time, it is noted that legal custom is characterized by a separate catalog of functions and tasks that need to be studied. Theregulatory, explanatory, protective, defensive, inflectional, reconstitutive, ideological-educative, identification-communicative, antimonopoly,and legal-resource functions of legal custom are analyzed. The administrative and organizational components of the regulatoryfunction of legal custom are highlighted. The preventive and restrictive components of the protective function of legal custom are cha -racterized. It is substantiated that these functions are inextricably linked with the tasks of legal custom.Based on the analyzed functions, the following tasks of a legal custom are allocated: the legal regulation of social relations; cla -rification of provisions of the legislation, acts of law enforcement, texts of agreements, terms and symbolic actions; legal protection ofpublic goods and values; providing opportunities to protect rights and freedoms; stabilization of the legal system, its protection fromill-considered and risky transformations; reproduction of the acquired legal experience in new conditions; ensuring the flexibility of thelegal system; influence on the worldview of the individual and society in general; determining the affiliation of the subject to a parti -cular community and maintaining communication between its members; prevention of monopoly in the legal system of a normativelegal act or other sources of law; formation of material for the systematization of law.It is argued that legal custom, as a social phenomenon, evolving in the process of history, performed a wide range of functionsthat correlated with its tasks. Not every period, people, or locality is characterized by a full set of analyzed functions and tasks, but itis worth noting the possibility of their implementation by the legal custom in general, as evidenced by past experience and the currentstate of legal relations. The results of the research, on the one hand, complement the understanding of the nature of legal custom, andon the other – prove the feasibility of further use of this source of law in modern legal systems.