Challenges to Legal Education in the Context of  Lithuania’s Civil  Service Modernization Cover Image

Teisės specialistų rengimas Lietuvos valstybės tarnybos moderni zavimo kontekste
Challenges to Legal Education in the Context of Lithuania’s Civil Service Modernization

Author(s): Darijus Beinoravičius, Mantas Bileišis, Milda Vainiutė
Subject(s): Education, Law, Constitution, Jurisprudence, Civil Law, Civil Society, Governance, Public Administration, Public Law
Published by: Mykolas Romeris University
Keywords: law qualifications; civil service; civil service reform; Lithuania

Summary/Abstract: Since 2008 Lithuanian political and administrative elites are engaged in debates over reforming the civil service of Lithuania. The result of these debates is the proposed new edition of the Law on Civil Service which was submit ted for parliamentary approval in 2015. The bill envisages a fundamental review of many practices in the civil service on Lithuania. One of those is the shift in focus from stressing formal education to stressing competence evaluation in the process of civil servants selection, t raining and career. However, in most respects Lithuanian public administration remains firmly in the grips of the continental legal tradition and this means that large proportion of the civil service corps is made up of specialists with legal education. There are no reasons to assume that this would be changing, and therefore a need for a large number of lawyers in the civil service will remain. In parallel, the Lithuanian legal education is strictly regulated, primarily to cater to the need of the Judiciar y branch of the gover nment. And thus the changing nat ure of employment requirements in the Executive creates a divergence of labour market needs with regard to legal qualif ications. And this consequently poses a series of challenges to higher education institutions t raining lawyers. In this ar ticle we concept ualize the challenges that are emerging in the context of the moder nization of the Civil Service of Lithuania.

  • Issue Year: 14/2015
  • Issue No: 4
  • Page Range: 625-638
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Lithuanian