Research on Legal Education in Asia

開催日: 2019年11月22日（14:30～17:10）
会場: Conference Room, Asian Legal Exchange Plaza (2F), Nagoya University
主催: Nagoya University Center for Asian Legal Exchange (CALE)
Nagoya University of Economics (NUE)
Tashkent State University of Law (TSUL)
Uzbek Journal of Legal Studies (UJOLS)
言語: English

Characteristics of Legal Education in Uzbekistan and Challenges of Transition Period

Program

Moderator: Davronbek UBAYDULLAEV (LL.M, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University)

14:30-14:40 Opening Remarks
– Akira FUJIMOTO (Director/ Professor, Center for Asian Legal Exchange, Nagoya University)
14:40 – 15:10 Roundtable Rapporteur
– Aziz ISMATOV (Assistant Professor, Center for Asian Legal Exchange, Nagoya University),
“Experiments with the Legal Education Doctrine in Uzbekistan. Select Critical Matters, their Pros and Cons”
15 minutes break
15:25 – 17:00 Discussion/Q&A

Discussants:
– Ayako HARADA (Professor, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University)
– Joan BLUM (Associate Professor, Boston College Law School)
– Representative from Tashkent State University of Law
– Alisher UMIRDINOV (Associate Professor, Nagoya University of Economics)
– Umida ASHUROVA (Associate Professor, Kinjogakuin University)

(We also expect the spontaneous participation of students and professors from the TSUL based in Tashkent via online video conferencing system)
17:00 – 17:10 Closing Remarks

– Alisher UMIRDINOV (Associate Professor, Nagoya University of Economics

In a broader historical dimension, the legal education’s evolution in Uzbekistan demonstrates two main transitions; from theological to socialist, and from socialist to the modern (post-1991) legal education which is de jure non-socialist, but in fact, bears clear socialist characteristics. The first two decades of the post-Soviet period in Uzbekistan have demonstrated that law teaching institutions were left behind the transition process and remained widely untouched and, thus, increasingly unable to conceptualize a new form of legal training and produce a new generation of legal professionals who would be able to understand the challenges of transitional period. Simultaneously, the increase in the popularity of studying law in Uzbekistan in the context of its unclear nature since its independence – is a large post-communist phenomenon.

The legal education system in the present-day Uzbekistan is undergoing through a difficult period of obscure reforms. Regardless the intentions of the policymakers, existing small number of the law teaching schools have been maintaining ex-socialist curriculums and strong state-centrist components. On the other hand, a critical necessity to reform existing factual condition of legal education has subsequently resulted in certain attempts to transplant new programs and specializations, as well as what local educators unclearly address – ‘innovative’ teaching technologies. Maintaining such old and new compounds simultaneously poses an unresolved challenge, especially between the theoretical and practical elements of legal education in Uzbekistan. What can be observed recently is an apparent gravitation of legal education from mainly theoretical settings towards professional legal practice with a wider involvement of non-academic practitioners. Too much legal practice and decreasing amount of academic training in the education process in turn, raise serious concerns regarding the traditional philosophy of legal education. Such concerns appear as a result of objective and well founded fear that too much of legal practice can eventually kill the academic legal education. In the conditions of unparallelly existing theoretical and practical compounds, another challenge is absence in the process of legal education of a legal pedagogy component.

By considering old and new philosophies of legal education, there will be several objectives for holding the present workshop. First, we will look at the history and theoretical features of the legal education in Uzbekistan. Second, we will focus on how the government tried to reform the legal education sector by referring to the foreign experience. Eventually we will try to inject a novelty to the ongoing discussion and challenges faced by the present-day legal education concept, by referring directly to the feedback from local and foreign based professors.
The outcomes of this workshop will be published in a Special 2020 Issue of the online Uzbek Journal of Legal Studies.

連絡先：
Center for Asian Legal Exchange (CALE), Nagoya University
e-mail：cale-jimu@law.nagoya-u.ac.jp