Legal education in Russia: social disparities, market changes and post-Soviet legacy

Timur Bocharov and Aryna Dzmitryieva

Chapter 5 in Research Handbook on Global Legal Education, 2026, pp 87-104 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In this chapter, we analyse the post-Soviet transformation of Russian legal education. As the state was the sole employer of lawyers, Soviet legal education was scarce, ideologically driven and provided mainly by correspondence. During the transition to a market economy, Russian legal education saw a massive expansion, driven by structural changes in the labour market and deregulation of the higher education system. The number of law schools grew from 40 in the late Soviet period to nearly 1,000 by the early 2010s. The market transition also led to a significant increase in the proportion of women among academic staff, as many male academics left universities due to low salaries and heavy teaching loads. Despite these significant changes, legal education is highly stratified and fragmented; largely a Soviet legacy. It is now divided into three segments. The small number of elite law schools hire the most qualified professors, attract students with higher test scores, and enjoy better funding and autonomy. They try to introduce innovative teaching methods such as internships, moot courts, and legal clinics. Mainstream law schools form the largest and most diverse segment. They launch law programmes for profit, often with varying quality. In these schools, the correspondence format and outdated lecture-based teaching methods still play an important role in legal training. Finally, departmental schools are unique post-Soviet institutions affiliated with law enforcement agencies like the police or prosecution. Training in these schools in many ways resembles military education and is less demanding in terms of curriculum complexity. This institutional structure reproduces inequality in the legal profession as the graduates of elite schools are employed in the high-paid private sector, the law enforcement agencies recruit the graduates of departmental schools, and many mainstream law school graduates exit law altogether. Overall, the stratified and fragmented landscape of Russian legal education reflects post-Soviet transformation and bears traces of Soviet legacies that have shaped the development of the legal profession.

Keywords: Post-Soviet Transformation; Legal Education; Russia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781788117005
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