This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The article analyzes challenges in teaching legal disciplines at higher schools of engineering focus and describes the contributors own practical experience in the issues under consideration. The authors substantiate the need to critically rethink approaches to teaching legal disciplines at engineering universities, emphasizing the low level of legal consciousness and legal culture among students. While designating the degree of the problem, the authors suggest ways to increase the overall level of legal literacy of students and cite as an example one of the interactive engagement methods of students in legal practice. The authors underpin their research with the theoretical frameworks and hands-on experience of researchers from Russia and abroad. The main research methods included analysis, synthesis, questioning, observation, survey, and comparison. The authors have explored into the issues of legal education, formation of legal culture among engineering students and suggested the most efficient ways to overcome the crisis of legal knowledge. In research, the authors developed and described an interactive engagement method of students studying legal disciplines in the realities of practicing law. The study resulted in the following basic conclusions: the main objectives of teaching legal disciplines at engineering universities are to enhance legal literacy, legal culture and legal consciousness of students; educating specialists capable to provide legal support in the industry is impossible without overcoming ignorance of law; the dialectical connection between the level of students' legal consciousness and the quality of their legal education is one of the key factors of efficient educational process.