Resumo: This project is framed in the current debate concerning the impact that education may have (and should have) on the well being of developed democratic society (USAID, 2007; UNESCO, 2006) and focuses this crucial aspect of contemporary life by paying particular attention to the role that legal and judicial education play in European societies. Judicial systems and justice administration gained spectacular importance over the last decades due to the significant expansion of the judiciary within domestic political systems and to the enhancement of legal and quasi legal mechanisms of dispute settlement which socio-economic and political actors increasingly rely upon. The European Union exhibits these features in a peculiar way. If on the one hand some member States underwent processes of judicialisation of domestic politics, judicial coordination and legal harmonization proved to be in the last decade (starting from the European Council held in Helsinki in 1999) a challenging and at the same time inescapable issue the process of integration is dealing with. Among the many several aspects mentioned in a huge variety of official documents issued by the European institutions as for the judicial cooperation and the enhancement of the mutual trust among the member States, judicial training and socialization of legal elites to a core of common principles came out as prioritized issues of the European agenda. In the Communication adopted by the European Commission in June 2006 judicial training is outlined as a domain in which European actions should be boosted and enhanced. Despite the institutional attention put on this, legal education offered within the member States did not develop accordingly: judicial governance is not properly analyzed within the curricula offered by the universities nor a deep and detailed preliminary study of the similarities and differences that are exhibited by the member States as for their own systems of legal education and judicial training is still missing. Surely, it can not be denied that judicial schools developed courses and programs that take into account the European dimension of justice administration. However, a systematic, comprehensive, self-reflective and far looking strategy aiming at providing the future legal elite with a truly speaking Europe-sensitive curriculum of judicial studies is defecting. This project, which is run in three years, wants to fill this space and provide a sound, innovative and flexible proposal for the creation of an European curriculum of judicial studies, which can be offered by high education institutions and partly integrated by schools of legal and judicial education. For self-awareness is the very basis for a successful strategy, the project comprises among its work packages a first preliminary study of the programs offered in the member States within the field of legal education and public administration and administrative science. It does so because judicial studies are the outcome of a complex and reasoned texture of analytical contents drawn from the knowledge of how public sectors work, how legal reasoning, judicial decision making are de facto carried on, how judicial offices are managed, how formal organization and bureaucracies function in modern societies. The preliminary knowledge of what is thought to undergraduate, graduate and post graduate students so far provides an extremely rich basis to step forward and to construct a new curriculum, which will be called judicial studies. The development of this new curriculum is the main goal pursued by the project. Partners involved into it will work intensively to elaborate a proposal by the end of the second year of the project. The third year is devoted to discuss and to spread off the outcomes achieved. Diffusion and discussion will take place within and outside the academic field. Civil society organizations, bar associations and political institutions will be extensively involved.