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The Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages
Moscow State Linguistic University

Faculty of Law

Set up in 1995, we are proud to be one of the first universities in the country to pioneer new approaches to legal education in Russia. With the legal profession becoming increasingly global in outlook, foreign language facility is likely to be central to lawyers in the 21-st century. We provide extensive legal training in law and legal system with a strong focus on foreign languages, international and European law as well as foreign legislation.

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To make sure that our graduates can work effectively in international settings, we have designed LSP programmes in different foreign languages to train our law students to use language skills in various legal and cultural contexts and at different levels of complexity. Our students get an intensive training in two FL, one of them English, thus developing the language skills they will need in their professional work. Uniquely, we offer a Legal Translation Course thus creating opportunities for our students to thrive in today’s competitive legal market. FL facility enables future lawyers to explore foreign legal systems through a comparative approach, refer to the original sources of information, be it contracts or best examples of legal thought, better understand the concepts and underlying philosophy of international law.

To immerse our students in legal discourse in foreign languages, we invite Russian legal scholars who are fluent in foreign languages and experienced practitioners from other countries. Thus we have professors of London Metropolitan University reading Commercial Law, lecturers from the Institute of East European Law at Kiel University delivering Comparative Legal Studies and Comparative Analysis of Legal Terms. Recently experienced practitioners from the American Bar Association in Russia gave talks in English on “Comparative Analysis of US and Russian Debtor Creditor Laws.”

Our curriculum combines legal theory with numerous opportunities to put theory into practice. We have opened a state-of-the-art crime lab and a moot court equipped and designed to replicate a modern courtroom. The crime lab is used for regular classes with students, for proficiency training of forensic experts, etc. The facilities of the moot court make it possible to use e-resources, record proceedings and play the video. Simulated court proceedings are staged not only in Russian, but also in Fls with a detailed debrief and analysis of students' work.

We use interactive 3D technology to reconstruct a crime scene in the classroom, when students get the illusion of being at the actual crime scene. This immersive virtual environment lets them visualize and investigate actual and instructor conceived crime scenes by going through all the stages from search and seizure to face-to-face confrontation. The software makes it possible to select the crime scene, the type of crime and the evidence.

We regularly invite visiting speakers – eminent legal scholars, justices of the RF Supreme Court, distinguished lawyers and visiting professors from Universities and Law Schools of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, as well as influential decision makers in law, politics and business. Law firms visit the Faculty to talk to and advise students about career opportunities.