Abstract
The legal culture of students (hereinafter LCS) can be defined as a spiritual and material system which ensures the effective usage of legislative and other regulatory documents in professional activities to solve issues. The LCS in professional training is a unity of gnoseological, axiological, activity-based and technological components which can be considered as criteria in forming this culture. The selected structural components of the LCS in professional training are refracted into functional ones. The most important functions are: cognitive-transformative, legal-regulatory, value-normative, communicative, prognostic, legal socialization, and humanistic functions. The pedagogical model of the LCS formation, represented by the target, structural-content, organizational-procedural and control-evaluation components, which reveals the theoretical essence, internal structure and logic of the complex process under consideration, the unity of all its elements that are interrelated and interdependent, allows creating a legal educational space and provides for the process of forming the LCS in the conditions of professional and pedagogical education. The basic principles in the formation of LCS in professional training are revealed: consistency, conceptuality, legal conditionality, and prognostic-based principles.