Keyword: «law students»

In the context of increasingly complex legal regulation, expanding the interpretative space of law enforcement, and strengthening the competency-based focus of higher legal education, developing legal argumentation in law students is becoming a significant theoretical and didactic task. Insufficient development of an argumentative culture manifests itself in a weak connection between norms and facts, the substitution of justification for the reproduction of normative material, difficulties in counter argumentation, interpretative instability, and insufficient readiness for publicly presenting a legal position. The aim of this article is to theoretically substantiate approaches to developing legal argumentation in law students and identify their didactic potential for designing the educational process in higher legal schools. The research methodology is based on systemic, competency-based, hermeneutic, logical-argumentative, rhetorical-discursive, and professional activity-oriented approaches. Theoretical analysis, comparison, conceptual and categorical reconstruction, structural and functional generalization and pedagogical modeling were used. As a result, the conceptual status of legal argumentation as a meta-subject professional and legal ability of a student to construct, verify and present a substantiated legal position in the conditions of regulatory uncertainty, factual variability and communicative competition was clarified; the argumentation situation as a basic didactic unit of training was substantiated; normative-cognitive, interpretative, factual-analytical, logical-procedural, rhetorical-communicative, axiological and reflexive-evaluative components were identified; the levels of formation of legal argumentation and pedagogical conditions for the development of argumentative competence were determined. The theoretical significance of this article lies in its integration of logical-formal, hermeneutic, rhetorical-discursive, and competency-based approaches into a holistic model of legal argumentation. Its practical significance lies in the potential use of the proposed components, levels, criteria, and conditions in designing academic disciplines, legal cases, assessment tools, written assignments, academic debates, and methodological scenarios for the professional training of preservice lawyers.