Education Policy in the Field of Legal Studies: the Constraints of Development of Capable Policy Design

This paper focuses on policy constraints in terms of Russian education policy in legal field that preclude development of capable policy design. Policy design is a field of study within public policy that has roots in political science and has relation to the rational tradition of policy studies (Dahl & Lindblom, 1953; Kirschen et al., 1964; Tinbergen, 1952). Howlett and other authors created a typology of policy formulation spaces, that distinguishes design and non-design processes (Howlett & Rayner, 2013; Howlett & Mukherjee, 2014;Howlett, Ramesh & Chandarkar, 2015;Wu, Ramesh, & Howlett, 2015). Non-design situations are not fully researched in the field of policy studies, especially in empirical way. The goal of this paper is to determine the constrains for development of policy capable design in Russian education policy in the field of legal studies. We attempt to answer the following question: Why Russian education policy in the legal field is designed poorly? We make the analysis of the contemporary state of legal education at the university level in terms of the correspondence of Russian education to global trends of legal profession comparing European and Russian legal education. Using the Howlett’s typology, we study Russian legal education in dynamics from Soviet times till nowadays. As to applied importance, this research proves the idea that there are gaps between Russian and European legal education. They are stipulated by particular constrains, for example, the role of lawyer in the society is seen as a sate servant that comes form the Soviet policy legacy, then politicization and a lack of civil society participation affects government intention, policy capacity and the level of government knowledge. The theoretical value our work is that we show that there are additional dimensions for policy processes placing three stages of policy processes within policy formulation spaces.