THE PRACTICE-ORIENTED LEARNING AS A TOOL OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEGAL EDUCATION IN UKRAINE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the disclosure of the properties of practice-oriented learning as a tool for the development of legal education. It is paid the attention to the relations between theoretical and practical learning in the process of teaching law students. It is emphasized that higher legal education has to preserve all the qualities of university education. It is argued that it is necessary to go away from learning tasks aimed at assessing the theoretical knowledge of students, and instead of them there should be introduced the professional tasks into the educational process, where it is required an appropriate level of theoretical knowledge to solve them. It is emphasized that a practice-oriented approach to the teaching of future lawyers requires a careful rethinking of teaching methods and informed decisions about the ratio of lectures, practical, individual lessons, which are approved in the curriculum. Because, the inconsistency of the ratio of such classes in the direction of one or another side leads to the inability of the student to use the theoretical knowledge in practice or to the inability to justify the legal position or determine the subject of dispute, what can essentially make impossible the proper assessment of life situation and its solution at a high professional level. In the research it is offered to provide increase of level of education quality of students-lawyers by implementation of case study. There are given the peculiarities of case studies of legal subjects. There are presented the results of implementation of case studies in the article that were implemented in the teaching of subject “Labor Law of Ukraine”, in particular: the first type – is a case, the task of which can be a solution the case on the merits; the second type is a case that is played out in the audience as a role play, where two teams of students represent the participants of the trial, and a separate team acts as judges. Such approaches to the preparation of case studies primarily intensify the activities of students; allow them to focus on solving the legal cases and to form the teamwork skills.