Alice in the Wonderland: The experience of changing Legal Education in the strange environment

1. Alice in the Wonderland:The experience of changing Legal Education in the strange environment Arkady Gutnikov St.Petersburg Law School Clinical Legal Education Foundation agutnikov@gmail.com

2. Important preliminary notes: • It is a small private Law School, est. 1992 (200-250 students at all) • The main program is a 5-year program to get a Diploma of Lawyer • It’s enough to practice law as a private lawyer or corporative lawyer, or lawyer on the governmental service, incl. a police investigator or prosecutor’s assistant , or in any other settings excepted the Bar (the Bar has the admission exams)

3. Important preliminary notes: • Students enter the Law School right after the high school in the age of 17 • The majority of students choose the Law School because of lack of preparation to humanitarian, medical, natural science or technical higher education (another accessible options for them are Management or Public Administration) • Students, represented Russian middle class, pay tuition; just few of them get a free of charge education because of a special learning successes • The motivation for about 70% of male students is to escape the military service • Just 20-25 (from year to year) percents of students regularly use Internet for informational and educational purposes • No more than 50% of students graduated from the Law School (the rest moved to another Law Schools or Universities)

4. Important preliminary notes: • The Federal Educational Standards, developed by the Ministry of Education, regulates the program objectives, names, content and hours for the most of subjects, including “practice” (sort of internship out of University) • The Law School is able to choose several “specializations” (like Constitutional and Administrative Law, Civil Law, Criminal Law, International Law) and include special courses in the framework of the concrete specialization • The number and hours for optional courses are very limited by the Federal Educational Standards

5. Important preliminary notes: • The compulsory subjects are very theoretical and based on the repetition of Statuses • The main teaching methods are lectures and seminars , which focuses on clarification of lectures and solving the simple cases (the task is to find an applicable article from the Code) • The form of exams is oral questioning-answering • The Federal Educational Supervision Service is in charge of the accreditation procedure in the form of statistical control (number of professors, books, square meters etc.) and tests (to assess how students memorize the text of Codes)

6. Important preliminary notes: • Most of law teachers work part-time in several Law Schools • Most of law teachers are legalistic-oriented, conservative and skeptical on the concepts of Rule-of-Law, Human Rights, democracy and constitutionalism • The academic level of most of them is very poor • The traditional authoritarian and paternalistic educational environment is more appropriate for most of faculty members as well as for students

7. Important preliminary notes: • The traditional understanding of the law profession is the state service (a kind of bureaucracy ) • The modern mainstream understanding of the law profession is like: “Nothing social, just business!” • There is no one body, represented the law profession (like ABA in the United States) • There are no social requests to legal education, articulated public expectations of a good lawyer, and professional standards of conduct

8. VERY OPTIMISTIC PICTURE, ISN’T IT? • YES! THERE IS ALMOST NOTHING TO BE CHANGED. JUST DESTROY AND REPLACE BY SOMETHING TOTALLY NEW... - OR PLAY THE GAME: BEHAVE AS NORMAL PERSON IN AN UBNORMAL WORLD!

10. Challenges/opportunities: • The educational reform is aimed to establish 2-level program: • Bachelor of Law – 4 years • Master of Law – 2 years How to reframe the curriculum?

11. Challenges/opportunities: • The new Federal Standards will come on 2009 How to change the approach into outcomes-oriented and based on the modern professional requirements?

12. Challenges/opportunities: • The professional community is going to become more structured and concerned on legal education: • Association of Lawyers of Russia (ALR) is in process of establishing • The “Public Accreditation” of the Law Schools is in agenda • Legal Institutions (the Supreme Court, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Federal prosecutor’s Office, Federal Bar and Regional Bars, Federal Customs Service, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and others), intervene the legal education, establishing new Law Schools or specialized programs at the existed Law Schools How to involve professionals into the process of formulating the outcomes and assessment? And how to combine or to make a choice between common preparation of Lawyer and specialized training for guaranteed employment?

13. There is much more challenges and opportunities for us, coming from the real social needs and the ambitious mission of the Law School: To be an innovative center (incubator) for the initiatives in the areas of Law, Education and Social Projects, aimed to train people to solve social problems using Law and other non-violence methods of conflict resolutions, basing on moral values and taking into account the good for themselves, their families, people in the local community, the society and the world.

14. Then Alice wake up and… found herself in Atlanta, reading the Carnegie Report.  THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION, DEAR FRIENDS! AND WELCOME TO OUR WONDERLAND!