CO-CREATED LEGAL EDUCATION AND THE PREVENTIVE ARCHITECTURE OF EU CYBERCRIME GOVERNANCE

Abstract

European Union cybercrime governance has achieved significant legislative and institutional sophistication through criminal law harmonisation, cybersecurity risk regulation, and transnational enforcement coordination. Nevertheless, prevailing regulatory and scholarly approaches remain disproportionately enforcement-centric, overlooking the epistemic infrastructures necessary for sustainable regulatory coherence and preventive compliance. This article identifies a critical lacuna in EU digital governance: the marginalisation of legal education as a structural regulatory instrument capable of enhancing cybercrime prevention, institutional resilience, and harmonised enforcement across Member States. Advancing an interdisciplinary analytical framework integrating preventive governance theory, regulatory pluralism scholarship, and co-creation governance models, the article argues that co-created legal education constitutes a novel form of preventive regulatory infrastructure within EU cybercrime governance. The study employs doctrinal analysis of EU cybercrime legal instruments, comparative evaluation of Member State educational governance across four analytically distinct jurisdictions, and normative regulatory modelling. Confronting the constitutional constraint of Article 165(4) TFEU — which expressly excludes legislative harmonisation of education — the article designs its normative model to operate through soft-law coordination, the Open Method of Coordination, and programmatic EU financing. It contributes original knowledge by reconceptualising legal education as a soft harmonisation mechanism that strengthens mutual trust, regulatory legitimacy, and interdisciplinary compliance ecosystems within multi-level digital governance. By proposing an institutionally grounded co-created legal education model, the study advances a preventive epistemic governance paradigm with transformative implications for EU cybersecurity policy, national regulatory capacity-building, and transnational cybercrime governance.