The article explores various approaches to the concept of a legal norm, its characteristics, and the definition of the structure of a legal norm. To analyze these approaches, the author examines the definitions provided in specialized legal dictionaries and scientific works from both the Soviet and modern periods. It is revealed that, despite the diversity of definitions, scholars generally agree on the following characteristics: establishment (or sanctioning) by the state; regulation of legal relations that grant participants subjective legal rights and subjective legal obligations; and protection by the state. In the modern period, lawyers also identify similar features of a legal norm, which are described by the author of the article: normativity, representative and obligatory content, security by the force of state coercion, formal certainty, systematization, mandatory execution, general nature, non-personalized, multiple action. The author also describes various approaches to defining the structure of a legal norm: the classic approach to a three-element structure, which is the most frequently mentioned in scientific works, as well as approaches to identifying two and four elements in the structure of a legal norm.