This article is dedicated to the memory of L.E. Lapteva, a prominent Russian scholar and renowned specialist in the history and theory of law and state, as well as the history of political and legal thought. In her later years she devoted considerable attention to the issues of legal culture in Russia, and in particular, the professional legal awareness of future lawyers. In her works she bitterly noted the displacement of historical and theoretical disciplines from legal education. The author develops these ideas by L.E. Lapteva, emphasizing the problems and prospects of legal philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge in the system of modern Russian jurisprudence and an academic discipline within the educational process.