Together with legal experts Steven Blockmans (T.M.C. Asser Institute) and Zdeněk Kühn (Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic) CILC visited Macedonia to hold two seminars on the role of jurisprudence in university law education and training programmes for legal professionals.
On Monday May 16 the Academy for Judges and Public Prosecutors (AJP) hosted a meeting that focused on jurisprudence and its influence on the development of legislation, court practice and training programmes for legal professionals. This seminar paved the way for a next round of follow-up workshops with AJP trainers on methods to systematically build in jurisprudence in the training courses for judges and public prosecutors.
On Tuesday the project team visited the city of Tetovo to address the Dean, the teaching staff and the students of the Law Faculty of the South East European University (SEEU). Here the experts spoke about jurisprudence in higher education in the Low Countries and the Czech Republic, highlighting its position in course curricula, the rationale for incorporating it, and examples of ways to use jurisprudence in law teaching. In the second part of the day, the project team identified several law courses that will function as pilots for follow-up workshops on obtaining the knowledge, skills and curriculum tools to introduce in a more systematic way jurisprudence in the undergraduate and graduate programme.
Incorporating jurisprudence in university curricula and training courses for legal professionals will enhance the use of case-law in the Macedonian legal practice. This in turn will support the Macedonian legal system in becoming more uniform and consistent.
Next steps in the project will include the follow-up workshops on building in jurisprudence in law education, further familiarization with jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and the design of a strengthened web-based jurisprudence database for domestic and international case-law.