Formation of legal education at the University of Lviv and universities of Great Britain in the middle of the XVII–XIX centuries

Abstract

the middle of the 17th – 19th centuries. The author shows the peculiarities of the formation of legal education at the highlights universitiesthat nowadays hold leading positions in the world recognition, namely, Oxford, Cambridge, Melbourne and others. Therefore,their experience for the University of Lviv is extremely necessary. It shows that legal education was possible for the wealthy, but in theUK they managed to find a way to attract talented young people with different social statuses to get a legal education.In Great Britain between 1846 and 1855, the movement for the reform of legal education found its expression in a number of universitiesof Oxford and Cambridge, as well as in the state of legal education as such. At the same time, practicing lawyers got a higherlevel of training, which made them much more experienced than before the reform. As a result, the demand of employers for the wor -kers with a corresponding education increased.In 1846, a new English law classroom was established, making two courses a prerequisite for admission to the bar association.Unequal position of education at Lviv University for different segments of the population can also be seen at British universitiesas the conditions of admission and education itself were difficult, so many talented students could not pay for education because it wasexpensive. Consequently, mainly the children of wealthy families could receive education, including law. This approach to learning didnot always give the desired result. Due to such stereotypes that had emerged in the society, the process of development of legal educationslowed down. British universities realized the problem more quickly, starting to provide various types of scholarships and grantsfor talented applicants. Such things inserted the desired result, and those relatively young universities today are gaining internationalrecognition.Today, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21th century we see that Lviv University entered the ranking of the best universitiesin the world according to the «Times Higher Education Ranking» (receiving 1001st place). This indicates prospects and potentialfor improvement. But today’s result would not have been fixed without the work of the rector of Ivan Franko National Universityof Lviv Volodymyr Petrovych Melnyk, who has done and is still doing a lot on the way of recognition and entrance of the Universityinto the world rankings.In 1850 a school or a separate examination in law and modern history was established in Oxford as a part of reform movementthat raised the level of teaching at the university. In 1872 the law school was separated from modern history in the form of a higherschool of law (for a bachelor’s degree in the humanities). Even then, students mainly studied Roman law, jurisprudence and internationallaw, and learned about the history of English law, not the law of their time. According to a historian at Oxford Law School,«something less like a professional law school is hard to imagine». A separate examination for the bachelor’s degree in civil law, beforeits reform in 1873, contained little English law. Only few students passed it.In Cambridge, to get a bachelor’s degree in law, Roman law dominated, but some English laws were included for comparativepurposes alongside the history of law, national law and the philosophy of morality.