Relevance of the issue. This article is devoted to the issue of the significance and role of legal expertise of municipal legal acts in the context of the implementation in Russia of the principle of unity of the system of public authority. The introduction of the provision on the unity of the system of public authority into the constitutional text and its development in the current federal legislation for several years of the constitutional reform never gave a clear idea of the concept. Understanding the practical consequences of the reform is difficult due to the lack of the whole new administrative and political practices that would change the nature of the relationship between the levels of public authority.

Research purpose and methods. Today, legal expertise of legal acts as part of the general activity of maintaining a register of municipal legal acts remains a basic way to ensure the unity of the legal space and one of the possible tools for implementing the single public authority concept. The practice of conducting legal expertise of municipal acts by the authorities of the RF entities has revealed a number of problems associated with the uncertainty of the nature of the legal expertise itself, lack of clearly established legal consequences of ignoring its results, with poor methodological and technical equipment of the expertise and, ultimately, with its low quality. In the article, formal legal, comparative, statistical and other research methods were used.

Results and proposals. According to the author, the solution to these problems may be associated with the formalization of expert activities, identification of negative consequences that occur if the local government would not eliminate legal defects revealed through legal expertise, and the scientific development of the methodological basis of legal expertise. The purpose of legal expertise, as practice, to ensure the unity of the system of public power, should not only be to check the formal compliance of legal acts of lower legal force with higher ones, but to assess the efficiency of authorities coordination, feasibility of their decisions, correlation of interests at all levels of public power with each other and with the citizens’ interests.

Keywords: legal expertise of legal acts, municipal rule-making, register of municipal normative legal acts, unity of the legal space, unity of the public authority system, constitutional reform