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  • Volume 15, No. 3, 2025

  • European integration – driving force behind the development of Ukraine’s legal culture and the modernisation of its legal system

  • Received 17.04.2025,
  • Revised 04.09.2025,
  • Accepted 29.09.2025
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Volume 15, No. 3, 2025
  • legal integration; legislative adaptation; values; rule of law; legal consciousness; legal education
  • https://doi.org/10.63341/naia-chasopis/3.2025.45
  • Pages 45-58

The aim of this study was to analyse the development of Ukraine’s legal culture under the influence of the strategic course towards European integration, and its impact on the modernisation of the national legal system. The research employed interdisciplinary and terminological approaches, along with dialectical, hermeneutic, historical-legal, comparative-legal, and systems-functional methods, as well as legal modelling. The study clarified the concepts of “legal system” and “legal culture” and provides their characteristics. Its core was an analysis of the role of European integration – both within the Council of Europe and the European Union – in modernising Ukraine’s legal system and reforming its structural elements, particularly legal culture. The paper substantiated the importance of adapting Ukraine’s legal system to the legal order of the European Union, which entails not only approximating Ukrainian legislation to the EU acquis communautaire, but also embracing the system of legal values and principles, procedures and practices on which EU law is based, and reorienting towards European standards in legal scholarship and legal education. The study analysed national normative legal acts and acts of the European Union largely related to meeting the legal criterion for EU membership. Overall, the results may be useful for a more thorough examination of the evolution of Ukraine’s legal system under the influence of European integration – both within the Council of Europe and the European Union – and for the potential development of a draft Concept for Enhancing the Legal Culture of Ukrainian Society, as well as measures aimed at raising the level of legal culture among civil servants and their awareness of EU law

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