Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University () is a self-governing state higher law educational establishment of the IV level of accreditation, a national university, located in Kharkiv, Ukraine, named after Yaroslav the Wise. National Law University is the largest law school in Ukraine, which includes 10 faculties, institutes and colleges located in Kharkiv and Poltava.
In the rankings of national universities, National Law University is consistently ranked among the top three law schools in Ukraine.
History As a separate law school, the institution was established in 1930 as Kharkiv Institute of Soviet Construction and Law. However, its heritage could be traced back to 1804 with establishment of the main city university, the Kharkiv University (now Karazin University).
Imperial Kharkiv University
The history of the school began in the 19th century by the order of Alexander I with the establishment of the Imperial Kharkiv University on and the Department of Moral and Political Sciences as its part.
During its initial decades, the organization and operation of Kharkiv Imperial University were governed by its founding charter of 1804, which had been approved by Alexander I. Subsequently, the university's legal framework relied on the general charters of imperial Russian universities enacted in 1835, 1863, and 1884. A more comprehensive structure was introduced by the "General Charter of Imperial Russian Universities" on July 26, 1835. Under these new regulations, the university's existing department of moral and political sciences was officially reorganized and renamed the Faculty of Law in 1835.
Pursuant to Article 100 of the 1835 Charter, the complete course of study at the Faculty of Law lasted four years. The charter also granted the faculty the authority to conduct examinations for academic degrees and hold dissertation defenses. For instance, in 1844, Alexander Palumbetsky successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in law, titled "On the System of Judicial Evidence in Ancient Germanic Law in Comparison with Russkaya Pravda and Later Closely Related Russian Laws."
Under the 1835 Charter, the curriculum of the Faculty of Law included seven core disciplines, each directly corresponding to an established academic chair. These fields of study encompassed the encyclopedia or general overview of the system of jurisprudence alongside Russian state laws, which comprised fundamental laws, laws on social estates, and state institutions. The curriculum also covered Roman legislation and its history, general, fundamental, and local civil laws, the laws of public order and decency (Blagochinie), laws on state obligations and finance, police and criminal laws, and the principles of general jurisprudence. Compared to the original 1804 charter, the 1835 reform established five new chairs dedicated specifically to domestic legislation and introduced a new foundational course, the Encyclopedia of Jurisprudence.
The University Charter of 1863 significantly expanded the faculty, providing for thirteen professors and six docents. The number of academic chairs was expanded to thirteen, incorporating highly specialized sub-disciplines. The curriculum grew to include the encyclopedia of law, which combined the encyclopedia of legal and political sciences with the history of the philosophy of law. It also featured the history of foreign legislation covering major ancient and modern foreign legal systems, the history of Russian law, and the history of Slavic legislation.
Roman law was split into its history, the dogmatics of Roman civil law, and Byzantine law, while constitutional law covered the theory of constitutional law alongside the constitutional laws of major states and Russia. Furthermore, specialized chairs were established for civil law, civil judiciary, and legal procedure, as well as criminal law, criminal judiciary, and legal procedure. Police law was divided into the doctrine of public safety and the doctrine of public welfare, while financial law integrated the theory of finance with Russian financial law. The expansion was completed by distinct departments for international law, political economy and statistics, and ecclesiastical jurisprudence.
From its inception, the university maintained a distinct hierarchy of teaching positions. These academic ranks included adjuncts, who served as assistant professors, and extraordinary professors, who were non-tenured faculty members that did not head an academic chair or hold seats on the faculty's academic council. Higher ranks comprised ordinary, fully tenured professors, alongside docents and masters. Additionally, the university utilized privat-docents, a designation applied either to experienced instructors with substantial practical achievements who lacked a postgraduate degree, or to those who held a degree but had not yet formally attained the rank of docent.
Over its first century of existence, the Faculty of Law at Kharkiv University steadily consolidated its academic foundations and expanded its institutional reach, experiencing consistent growth in both its student body and its teaching faculty.
At different times famous lawyers worked here, such as professors Mikhail Alekseyenko, , Nikolay Gredeskul, , , , Dmitri Kachenovsky, , , , , Mikhail Taube, Ilya Timkovsky, Mikhail Chubinskyi and others.
Following the October Revolution and the subsequent establishment of Soviet rule in Ukraine, Kharkiv Imperial University and its Faculty of Law entered a period of severe disruption. Administration of the university was transferred to the People's Commissariat for Education of the Ukrainian SSR (Narkompros). Through its decree of March 11, 1919, titled "On the Organization of the Management of Higher Educational Institutions," Narkompros attempted to implement a restructuring of higher education administration. The primary objective was to wrest institutional control from the traditional, established professor-led administration and transfer it to Soviet authorities. This shift was intended to garner political support from the working-class and proletarian student body while gradually integrating the pre-revolutionary teaching staff into the new ideologically driven educational framework.
Under these new regulations, primary administrative authority was vested in a commissar appointed by Narkompros. Concurrently, collective governing bodies managed academic, scientific, and educational activities. Faculty councils were established within each department, consisting of lecturing faculty, a small cohort of teaching assistants, and student representatives whose numbers equaled the total count of lecturers. Faculty councils then selected four delegates each to form the university’s overarching Scientific and Educational Council.
During the era of War Communism, these newly formed administrative bodies rapidly abolished several traditional core requirements within the Faculty of Law, including courses on the history and dogmas of Roman law and administrative-political law. By the spring of 1919, a broader climate of legal nihilism led some Soviet authorities to question the necessity of maintaining university law faculties altogether. For instance, the People's Commissar for Justice of the Ukrainian SSR, , citing discussions with Education Commissar Volodymyr Zatonsky, stated that the law faculty would likely be abolished and replaced with a specialized department within the Faculty of History and Philology offering a limited curriculum of eight legal disciplines.
Soviet administrative control was temporarily interrupted in June 1919, when the Soviet government in Kharkiv collapsed under the advance of General Anton Denikin Volunteer Army. This political shift created temporary conditions for restoring the university to its pre-Soviet organizational standards, which included resuming traditional student admissions. Of the 575 applications for enrollment submitted by September 20, 1919, seventy were directed to the Faculty of Law. However, this restoration proved brief, as Soviet forces recaptured Kharkiv on December 12, 1919. This event initiated a decisive shift in policy that ultimately culminated in the formal dissolution of the university, ending the operations of one of Ukraine's prominent educational and scientific institutions.
Institute of National Economy & Institute of Soviet Construction and Law In the early 1920s, Narkompros leadership actively pursued the liquidation of universities as institutions dedicated to "pure science," seeking instead to replace them with highly specialized, vocational schools. Within Narkompros, humanities and humanities-adjacent specializations—including legal education—were viewed through the lens of economic materialism. Consequently, Soviet educational policy mandated that legal and social science training be strictly tied to specific sectors of the national economy, such as industry, commerce, or agriculture, rather than existing as independent academic disciplines.
In 1920 by the decision of the Soviet government of Ukraine the Kharkiv Institute of National Economy was established on the basis of the . The former Faculty of Law of the Imperial Kharkiv University was transferred to the newly created university.
It was the basis of the Law Institute which trained lawyers for state and economic bodies. The first lecturers of the law faculty – the founders of the Institute – were law professors: , Volodymyr Koretskyi, , , , , and others who worked at the Kharkiv University before. They were holding scientific and teaching positions for many years and made a great contribution into formation and development of law science, lawyers' education and training.
In 1930 The Institute of National Economy, taking into consideration its status of an institute of higher legal education, received a new name: the Institute of Soviet Construction and Law. In May 1933 the institute was renamed into the Ukrainian Communist Institute of Soviet Construction and Law.
The primary mission of the new higher education institution was to train legal professionals and civil servants for the government bodies of the Ukrainian SSR, which were then located in the former capital, the city of Kharkiv. The Institute of Soviet Construction and Law trained personnel for the prosecution service, judicial authorities, and state and communist party institutions.
Kharkiv Law Institute
On July 1, 1937, the institution was renamed the Kharkiv Law Institute. Between 1930 and 1937, the institute comprised a preparatory department with full-time and evening courses, a faculty of Soviet construction, a legal (judicial) faculty, a correspondence department, as well as economic-legal and international faculties, both of which were abolished in 1933. The institute trained generalist legal professionals for careers in courts, prosecution, criminal investigation, advocacy, and notary offices.
During the pre-war years, the institute was headed by rectors P. I. Fomin (1920–1923), Ya. O. Sokolin (1923–1926), L. I. Velychko (1926–1929), and Ye. O. Kustolian (1929–1930), and later by directors K. K. Brandt (1930–1931), M. M. Yemynnyk (1931–1932), S. M. Tsarehradskyi (1933–1934), S. M. Kanarskyi (1934–1937), M. I. Levikov (1937), Ye. O. Monastyrskyi (1938–1939), and V. O. Barakhtian (1939–1941). The vice-rectors during this period were Vladimir Koretsky (1921), K. K. Brandt (1924–1926), V. V. Kryvytskyi (1926), Ye. O. Kustolian (1929), H. V. Sodin (1930), M. M. Yemynnyk (1930–1931), D. K. Piatak (1933), M. I. Levikov (1936–1937), and S. L. Fuks (1938–1939).