Quality of legal education in the BRICS countries

The relevance of the topic is determined by recent transitional process in higher legal education, aiming at finding its new directions and role of legal professionals in a changing world. Quality of higher legal education is one of the crucial problems in each state of the BRICS block. The objective of this article is to make a comparative analysis of legal education quality in the BRICS countries. In plethora of research literature related to higher education in general and legal education specifically in selected BRICS countries, there is a difficulty to find a comprehensive comparative analysis of the quality of legal training across educational institutions in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The authors identify common and specific features of legal training in the BRICS countries. The common drivers for legal education are global influence of the American education system, “explosive” growth in the popularity of legal education, urgent needs to reform educational process and its quality, growing differentiation of educational institutions into “elite” and “mass”, with a special role of each type of university in society. The peculiarities of legal education in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are primarily in the structure of educational institutions and bodies controlling quality of educational training; solutions to the borrowing educational experience and attempts at self-identification in the global educational space. The problems of legal education have been studied in dynamics over the past 20 years holistically (complex analysis). In their conclusions, the authors propose some results of a comparative legal analysis related to quality of higher legal education. In particular, they outline the leading role of the government in setting requirements for the content of educational process and lawyer's competencies; the increasing role of employers, public organizations and students in establishing requirements for law schools. The results of the research can be used both for academic studies and for practical purposes in reforming BRICS legal education.