Academic Discipline
Russian educational legislation today used to be a voluminous body of more than 1,000 laws and sublegal normative acts of different levels of jurisdiction comprising an unfathomable material for learning and apprehending.
Early 90-ies marked the emergence of education law as a research-led academic course for lawyers. Previously, students were instructed on legal issues of educational process within the general course of administrative law, from the perspective of public administration of education.
At the present time some Russian universities choose to teach Education Law either as an elective course for law faculty LLM students or as a compulsory component of pedagogical faculty curriculum; and their number is growing. For example, education law is taught at People’s Friendship University in Moscow as a specialised course on legal aspects of educational activities, while Kuban State University , Voronezh State Pedagogical University and Kalmytskiy State University introduce a 72-hours education law course as a compulsory discipline for future school teachers of law and history.
Higher School of Economics has designed ten separate modules focused on different aspects of management in education within a comprehensive Master’s course ‘State and Municipal Administration’. These modules are dedicated, for instance, to institutional background of regional education policy, contemporary issues of education law, comparative analysis of foreign educational systems, sociology of education, strategic development of educational systems, economics of educational institutions, marketing technologies of client-oriented education and so forth.
Most recent education law courses for lawyers are usually comprised of 7-10 themes, which may include but are not limited to the following: general characteristic of legal regulation of educational activity; legal sources of education law, educational legislation; participants of educational process (teachers, students, parents, institutions) and their legal status; state and municipal administration, supervision and control in education; legal regulation of educational and scientific activity of universities.
As to summarise, evolution of education law as an academic discipline meets the existing need of preparing good lawyers specialising on narrow field of education law. It also mirrors the intensive development of educational legislation.