Working Group formed to develop the Concept of the development of legal education in Ukraine

Questions raised on how to improve the legislative and institutional framework of legal education were discussed by the founding members of the Working Group on the development of the Concept of the development of legal education in Ukraine, which took place at the Ministry of Education and Science, chaired by Inna Sovsun, First Deputy Minister.

Attending the meeting were Oksana Syroyid, Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, Hanna Onyshchenko, Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine, Dmytro Storozhuk, First Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine, David Michael Vaughan, USAID Fair Justice project manager, Iryna Ivankiv, OSCE National Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine, and representatives of higher educational establishments and public associations.

Inna Sovsun stated that tomorrow’s lawyers must not only obtain the necessary qualifications but also adhere to professional values that match the requirements of Ukrainian society. For this to be achieved, there is an urgent need to revise the content, teaching methods and structure of legal education.

"The improvement of legal education is not only a question of the reform of higher education but also reform in the understanding of our approach as to what should be National Law in Ukraine",  said the First Deputy Minister.

The new Higher Education Law of Ukraine redefined the nature of university autonomy, under which universities create educational syllabuses and play a major role in shaping the curriculum. One of the important tasks is now to develop common standards in legal education, and working on that is the task of the newly-formed Academic Commission for Law of the Methodological Council of the Ministry of Education and Science. "Today there is an ongoing debate on the structure of legal education: whether there should be both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, or  sequential education to a master’s law degree", explained Inna Sovsun.

The First Deputy Minister reminded everyone that the Ministry, in conjunction with its partners – the USAID Fair Justice Project and the OSCE – is this year implementing a pilot project at specific educational establishments on applications for Master’s Law degrees using technology developed for external independent testing (EIT). “This project helps ensure the transparency of entry, and could be the basis for formulating a new qualifying exam for our future Law graduates", said Inna Sovsun.

Hanna Onishchenko, Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine, drew the attention of the participants to the problems in training lawyers. In particular, the large component of content of the Soviet legal system, and the use of open source textbooks by Russian authors in the education of lawyers: the need for institutional research.

Oksana Syroyid, Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, spoke on how content, teaching methods, and the structure of legal education, influence the vision of what should be the future representatives of the legal profession, what skills and abilities they will have, and who can be a lawyer. For the improvement and development of legal education, quality monitoring is required, the implementation of which should involve representatives of the legal professions. The next question that needs to be focused on is access to legal education. In particular, will there be a need in the job market for a Bachelor of Law? According to Oksana Syroyid, there is a strong need to develop new criteria for access to academic research and the products of research in the field of law.

It should be noted that the working group, approved by Ministry Resolution № 787 on 5 July 2016, will develop a Concept for the development of legal education in Ukraine and a working plan for its implementation.