Building Transversal Skills and Competences in Legal Education

Abstract

At the time when law graduates are facing new challenges in the constantly changing labor market, the main task of law schools as well as law professors is to educate undergraduates to become above all competent and ethical lawyers. Education should adequately prepare students for the working environment in or outside the legal profession. Curricula (including extra-curriculum activities), in addition to formal legal courses, needs to be enriched with continuous training to develop transversal competences. To meet this aim and to map the gaps of the current (traditional) model of law teaching from the students’ perspective, we have conducted a large-scale online survey with students at the Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade. The empirically obtained results, enabled us to identify and systematize the educational needs of law students that require further improvement. Having in mind that one of the main evaluation criteria of quality and success of the educational and teaching program is the level of graduates’ employability, an additional goal of this explorative research is to provide guidelines for the modernization of legal education, primarily in Serbia, but at the law faculties in the region as well.