Logical Design of Legal Education. Towards the Anniversary of Kutafin Moscow State Law University

Abstract

The paper deals with the problem of interrelation between two research programs — logic and jurisprudence — from antiquity to the present. Traditional logic has created and developed the Great Triad “Concept — Judgment — Inference” that has become an educational and methodological canon of humanitarian knowledge and education in general and legal knowledge and legal education in particular. The doctrine of the concept, the doctrine of judgment, the doctrine of inference (more precisely, the doctrine of proof) are essentially used in legal proceedings, law-making, and law enforcement. The author resorts to modern achievements of the theory and technology of scientific knowledge as a research methodology. Logical knowledge itself appears in the form of methodology. Under this approach, any science, both natural and humanitarian, necessarily defines its conceptual corpus. Any science, creating its own description of the subject area, uses theoretical provisions in the form of a set of theses and arguments expressed by judgments. Any science substantiates its vision of the world using a system of evidence. All these properties are subject to and correspond to the subject of logics taught in every law school in the context of legal logics or logics for lawyers. The place of logic in the framework of legal education is considered as a hierarchy of problems of the relation between the phenomena of “the logical” and “the legal” within the framework of the world-historical process, the relation between the phenomena of “the logical” and “the legal” within the framework of domestic history and domestic education system before 1917, i.e., before the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Soviet power, the relation between the phenomena of “the legal” and “the logical” in Soviet and post-Soviet history, creation of an education system, including legal education, in our country and the development of the logical science and logical education at Kutafin Moscow State Law University. The uniqueness of the study is associated with the use of the Transcript of the All-Soviet Meeting of Logic Teachers of Higher Educational Institutions held on June 21–26, 1948 in Moscow discovered and introduced into scientific circulation by the author of the paper. The result of the study proves the special importance of logic for lawyers as a reliable tool in situations of lawmaking, law enforcement and interpretation of legal norms.