The legal education system in Ukraine is begging for an overhaul. Little developed since independence in 1991, it is mired down in antiquated educational practices and stained with corruption.
Legal education plays a key role in the country’s future, yet it remains stuck in the past. This raises serious concerns about the quality of instruction in institutions that produce Ukraine’s future lawyers, prosecutors, judges and ministers of justice.
The legal education system is ripe for reform, says Nataliya Kuznetsova, a law professor and vice president of the Ukrainian National Academy of Legal Sciences.
“Everybody recognizes that the condition of legal education is not satisfactory, both for those who teach and for those who study, plus those who consume the end product, the employers,” she told the Kyiv Post.
But the system is also paradoxical: it produces some of Ukraine’s top professionals. This year, for example, President Volodymyr Zelensky became the first lawyer elected president.
Plethora of stakeholders
Reforming this system won’t be easy. The number of stakeholders is huge. Legal departments at universities; the ministries of education, justice and internal affairs; bar associations and students – all have their own visions for how the system should be organized.
The international community is also deeply involved.
The Embassy of the Netherlands financed a study of the legal education sector, conducted by the Ukrainian Dejure Foundation.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also runs the New Justice Program in Ukraine, which includes activities devoted to legal education. For example, in 2013, USAID helped develop an assessment program for the quality of legal education in university legal departments.
That push for reform got a boost after the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014, which ousted the corrupt, Russia-backed President Viktor Yanukovych and drove the country toward integration with the European Union.
Then, the Ministry of Justice drove change forward.
Improved legal education would provide a “foundation for judicial reform in a broad sense,” says former Deputy Justice Minister Serhii Petukhov.
Testing future lawyers
Since 2014, the legal education system can boast several accomplishments.
One of them is standardizing entrance exams for masters’ level law programs. Having standard tests helps graduates from less established bachelor programs to compete for entrance into postgraduate programs at the country’s best universities, they too can score high taking the test.
The exam also helps decrease corruption risks, a serious problem when students are competing for entrance to selective programs, and allows graduates in other fields to go to law school.
Law professor and an expert of the European Union project Pravo-Justice Andriy Boyko says he and Kyiv-Mohyla Academy President Andriy Maleshevych, USAID’s Artem Shaipov and Petukhov – all played a central role in the reform.
“We gathered together, as we understood that something had to be done,” Boyko told the Kyiv Post.
Boyko started reforming the legal department of Lviv National Ivan Franko University back in 2002 as a vice dean. Then, he was a member of the High Council of Justice, the judiciary’s highest governing body that appoints judges of all levels.
Boyko admits that there are some flaws in the entrance tests as they “do not check the ability to substantiate” one’s answers. He hopes that, once developed, this component will be included in a unified test for graduates of masters’ level courses.
So far, the exams have been received well by many stakeholders. However, the Ukrainian National Bar Association, or UNBA, is reluctant to give away its current right to take bar exams in the country. And the UNBA will likely fight for this right if the forthcoming standardized law graduation examination at master’s level substitutes the bar exams as such.
“We stand in categorical opposition to this (substitution), because this is just a blind application of the practice of foreign countries, in particular, those of Germany and the U.S.,” Valentyn Gvozdiy, the vice president of the UNBA, told the Kyiv Post.
Gvozdiy argues that Germany and the U.S., which are frequently referred to as good examples for Ukraine’s legal education reform, are federations and Ukraine shouldn’t follow their suit blindly.
“(Ukraine) is a unitary country with absolutely different principles and approaches not only to the state structure, but also to the legal system.”
Instead, Gvozdiy suggests leveling the professional requirements for judges, prosecutors and barristers.
The major argument for reforming legal education in Ukraine has been the low quality of knowledge among law graduates. One of the reasons, according to experts, is that even colleges of applied sciences – derogatively referred to as “cooking schools” by legal industry players – can give degrees in law in Ukraine. (Kyiv Post)
Innovating legal studies
Petukhov believes that the reform is necessary because the more graduates Ukraine has, the bigger chance the country will have honest public servants.
“If you want to have 6,000 honest judges, 8,000 honest prosecutors, 40,000 honest lawyers and maybe about several tens of thousands of honest public servants, then you need to ensure quality legal education as the gateway (to these careers),” Petukhov said.
In Petukhov’s view, the final goal of the reform is for quality legal education to be a prerequisite for judges, lawyers and prosecutors. The whole path shall go through classical universities.
Currently, both classical universities and applied science institutions offer degrees in law, while various self-governance bodies like the Ukrainian National Bar Association (UNBA) and the Judicial Qualification Commission control access to the legal profession through professional examinations.
Poor education
Being one of the most popular university degrees, law attracts tens of thousands of students every year, and many institutions have established legal departments to meet the demand.
Over 65,000 school graduates applied for various universities to study law across some 200 law schools in 2019, according to the Ministry of Justice.
But the growing number of legal departments has created certain fluctuations in quality.
Petukhov’s drive to assure quality led him and his colleagues to slash state financing for extramural legal education – when students study on their own and come to a university only to take end-of-term exams – because the tests showed that it was ineffective.
“They have weak knowledge,” he said. “If people want it, then they should go and study.”
While serving as justice minister, Pavlo Petrenko loved to criticize colleges of applied science that give degrees in law: “Gone will be the times when lawyers graduating from culinary vocational schools would, due to lack of knowledge, either ruin lives of people, or pass low-quality laws as lawmakers.”
But Petukhov doesn’t want to stop at just slashing financing of extramural studies. The network of educational institutions was designed for when Ukraine’s population was 52 million in the 1990s. Today an estimated 42 million citizens live in Ukraine.
“And now, just for getting in line with the demographic decline, a large number of institutes, departments and universities need to be closed,” he says.
Alexander Weigelt, a German lawyer managing the Ukrainian Nobles law firm, talks about investment Ukrainians can make abroad in May 2019 in Kyiv. Comparing German and Ukrainian legal systems, Weigelt thinks that the most obvious difference is that people in Ukraine get jobs in the profession earlier than in Germany. (InTax Media)
Uneasy transition to practice
Alexander Weigelt, a German lawyer managing the Ukrainian Nobles law firm, has the privilege of comparing Germany’s legal education system to that of Ukraine.
Weigelt thinks that the most obvious difference is that people in Ukraine get jobs in the profession earlier than in Germany.
In Germany, lawyers with completed education come to their job in their late 20s, sometimes early 30s, while in Ukraine, they start working five years earlier, the German lawyer said.
This difference creates both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, young Ukrainian graduates, in Weigelt’s opinion, are “less comprehensively educated in the sense of what they have in Germany.”
They are “lacking full understanding of the structure, and the background and why the law is as it is,” he said.
But this can be compensated. “If you have a bright lawyer, who is motivated and intelligent, people do get up to speed relatively quick,” Weigelt believes.
Iryna Venediktova, the head of the parliamentary committee on law policy, talks to the Kyiv Post on reforming the legal education system in the country in August 2019 in Kyiv. Venediktova thinks law degrees from colleges of applied science do not correspond with the level of knowledge needed to start a career in law. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Where does reform go?
After the recent change of political power in Ukraine, the fate of the legal education has fallen into the hands of Zelensky and his Servant of the People party.
A lawmaker for Servant of the People, Iryna Venediktova is the new chair of the parliamentary committee on law policy. Venediktova is likely to continue working on the reforms in question.
Venediktova told the Kyiv Post that legal education “is about forming certain (legal) culture.” It lays the foundation with theoretical subjects like theory of law, legal philosophy and goes up to specialized legal courses.
Venediktova thinks law degrees from colleges of applied science do not correspond with the level of knowledge needed to start a career in law. These schools give their graduates the same-looking diploma, but they don’t give the same knowledge, she thinks.
The lawmaker insists on either shutting down such schools or forcing them to align with the same standards.
Law professor Kuznetsova, who knows the legal education system from the inside, urges to remember the main task of legal education while changing it: universities must “create a complex of knowledge and skills enabling lawyers” to practice for the good of society and justice.
