Pre-university and university students get debating experience at a legal science festival

About 400 students from 15 regions of Russia participated in the recent All-Russian Legal Science Youth Festival held by the Institute of Law of Tomsk State University. School students and students from secondary professional education institutions practiced reasoning and listening and discussed relevant issues of modern-day legal science. The festival concluded with the 21st All-Russian Tournament on Forensic Science and Criminal Proceedings Krimcess, where the governor of Tomsk Oblast, Vladimir Mazur, was invited as an honored guest.

The legal science festival united the two traditional events held by the TSU Institute of Law: an all-Russian scientific conference and a tournament on forensic science and criminal proceedings. As emphasized by the director of the Institute of Law, Olga Andreeva, this year the festive mood is especially strong, for the institute is celebrating the 125thanniversary of legal education in Siberia.

The tournament began with a speech by the governor of Tomsk Oblast, who underlined the importance of studentship as a component of forming one’s personality, the significance of preserving traditions, and the role of a mentor in everyone’s life.

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Director of TSU Institute of Law, Olga Andreeva

The festival’s aim was encouraging pre-university and university students to increase their legal awareness and potentially apply it in hands-on situations or use it for research. The program included 13 sections, which hosted over 280 speakers representing 18 educational institutions from 15 regions of Russia.

For the first time, students of schools and secondary professional institutions tried themselves as speakers. Additionally, they took part in the debate tournament semi-finals and finals, where they practiced persuasion, fact searching, and active listening. Among the debate topics were the effectiveness of strict law and the right-to-die law as a natural right of a human.

Fourteen teams comprising students from 14 Russian universities took part in Krimcess, where they constructed facial composites and created graph representations of criminal tools. Beyond that, the event offered edutaining events.

The participants pool included businesspeople, and teaching staff and students of the TSU Institute of Law, among which the most notable were the executive partner of the legal firm LL.C-Law, Dmitriy Lizunov; head of the Department of Legal Affairs of the Tomsk Branch of PJSC RussNeft, Nataliya Gordeeva; senior lecturer of the TSU Department of Labor Law and Law of Social Security, Nikolay Demidov, and others. They discussed the transition to online for legal workers, the ups and downs of working and studying online, and the consequences of online education.

“Thanks to a variety of sections and new ways of interacting with each other, students from 35 educational institutions of Russia got to form new connections and exchange their thoughts, think about new project ideas, and find out what the requirements are at workplaces for graduates with background in legal science. We did the right thing by organizing an offline event—that way the impact was much greater,” shares Lev Shvets, head of the Scientific Youth Society of the TSU Institute of Law.