?
Развитие заочного юридического образования в СССР
The modern challenges facing legal education actualize the appeal to historical experience. The Soviet past continues to have a significant impact on all aspects of legal training. This is most noticeable in the ratio of forms of education. So far, less than half of law students are studying full-time. The rest of the students study legal subjects in person, by correspondence or by correspondence. Correspondence legal education first appeared in the late 1920s and still influences the legal profession, occupying an essential place in the training of lawyers. Initially, it was conceived to increase the number of qualified lawyers, improve the ideological training and education of Soviet justice workers. The main audience for distance learning was supposed to be working lawyers. To achieve these goals, special training plans were developed that were targeted at specific groups of employees of the institution. During the Soviet period, education was carried out in several educational institutions (departmental institutes, classical universities, the All-Union Law Correspondence Institute). All of them had branches in various cities of the USSR. Distance learning was geographically close to practicing lawyers, which allowed them to improve their skills. The largest educational institution with correspondence education was the All-Union Correspondence Law Institute. Until the 1950s, it occupied a dominant position among the country’s legal institutions. In the 1950s, its branches were transferred to classical universities in the regions and transformed into law faculties. The Higher School of Militia also had an extensive network of branches, where correspondence training of policemen began in 1947, and since 1952. The school began to produce certified lawyers. The territorial accessibility of correspondence legal education contributed to the fact that people who do not work as lawyers began to enroll in educational institutions. This led to a gradual loss of the original meaning of correspondence legal education, since students did not work in the legal field. The participation of various educational institutions with different directions in the training of lawyers led to the fact that correspondence legal education prepared lawyers for certain departments. In such conditions, a single legal profession could not be formed. The situation was aggravated by the presence of different requirements for admission to various universities. The peculiarities of correspondence legal education in the Soviet period laid the foundation on which modern training of lawyers is built.