The Trail to Integrated Understanding Russian Legal Education has been Blazed. What Comes Next?

Abstract

Sivitsky Vladimir - Professor, Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law, Faculty of Law, Saint Petersburg Campus of National Research University Higher School of Economics, Candidate of Juridical Sciences. Address: 16 Soyuza Pechatnikov Str., Saint-Petersburg, 190008, Russian Federation. E-mail: VASivickiy@mail.ru.

The text is a review of the book by N.S. Bondar’ Russian Legal Education as a Constitutional Value:National Traditions and Cosmopolitan Illusions (The Library of Judicial Constitutionalism series, Issue3, Moscow, 2013). The review states that Bondar’s book is the first separate work systematizing theproblems of the modern Russian legal education. The review notices the conceptual and emotionalcomplexity of the book despite its small size, and a serious contribution to arranging the discussion onRussian legal education in the form of a publication. There is an attempt to debate on some ideas expressedby N.S. Bondar’. In particular, he is skeptical about the Bologna process as to legal education.In response, an attempt has been made to consider the situation in a more constructive way allowinglarge centres of legal education to work in these conditions and use the bachelor — master pattern toimprove the educational environment (which is not denied by the author) by prohibiting master programsin weak legal schools. N.S. Bondar’ writes about the necessity to ensure the constitutional modelof the modern lawyer which should overcome the extremities of enforcement and entrepreneurial modelsof lawyers and the erroneous in the author’s opinion philosophy of legal pragmatism. In response,an attempt has been taken to show soft spots of lawyers educated under the constitutional model forworking in the actual environment. A proposal has been made to implement various models of preparinglawyers in the centres of legal education without abolishing the architecture of legal education for thesake of a uniform model of preparing lawyers. This does not deny the necessity to process attentivelyconstitutional law devices and ways of protecting the rights applicable to every legal area. As a conclusion,it should be said that the book by Bondar’ has laid the foundation to realizing the current Russianlegal education. Keywords: legal education, preparing lawyers, Bologna process, bachelor program,master program, constitutional model of a lawyer, legal pragmatism