ABSTRACT
Introduction Legal education in Cambodia has developed in the wider context of its political, social, cultural and economic development. Unlike research on other legal education systems in both developed and developing countries,1 the drastic political and social changes in Cambodia during the last century have made it impossible to review the development of legal education without particular reference to its different historical phases. There has been little continuity in Cambodia’s legal education system since it was first established in the late 1800s.2 The system that took root under the French colonial government did not survive the 1970s. A new start was therefore essential in the early 1980s, after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge. In this chapter, these two periods will be identified separately as times when formal legal education in Cambodia was born and reborn. Despite some similar features between the first and second births of the legal education system, the different ideological backgrounds drove them along separate paths of development. The latest political reforms of the 1990s have led the latest trends of Cambodia’s legal education development, based on the principles of marketization, democratization and administrative reforms. From a comparative point of view, the system is undergoing a process of revolution, without the underlying evolutionary records of continuity that exist in other countries.
