From Classroom To Courtroom - Challenges To Legal Education In India
Author: LawSphereX
Category: General Law
Published:
Updated:
FROM CLASSROOM TO COURTROOM:
CHALLENGES
TO LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA
Anjana M A, Advocate, Palakkad, Kerala
ABSTRACT
Legal education has an important role in ensuring social justice. It not only produces lawyers but also enhance the social development of the nation. It indirectly plays an instrumental role in the welfare of the nation. Education can be treated as a way for the development of society. But in the practical aspect there is a failure in fulfilling the aims of legal education due to various factors like lack of researchers, outdated curriculum, improper practical training etc. It has created a negative impact on the development of legal education in India. Even though there are many legal institutions in India but due to these challenges, it isn't able to provide fruitful results. This study will focus on the key challenges towards legal education in India and its possible remedies. Keywords: Legal education, Challenges, Social development.
1 INTRODUCTION
Education is the manifestation of perfection already in man – Swami Vivekananda. 1 Education is one of the important tool to mould the individual in the society. It not only imparts knowledge but it will bring overall development to the individual. For the development of individual as well as society, both the law and education plays an important role. Law is introduced to create a social order in the society. A nation’s development rests on its peoples’ welfare and it can be assured through the protection of law. These laws should be imparted in the society in an effective manner, otherwise it will hinder the society. In order to fulfil this objective, the role of legal education is an important one. There is a great need for education in law, in both general and specialised aspect.
Today the role of advocate is not limited to dispute settling, now they are playing a key role in the development of society. Therefore, the quality of legal education should be maintained. The quality in legal education reflects quality in law practitioners, judges and other law officers working in the legal field.
2 AIMS OF LEGAL EDUCATION
The aim of legal education is not just to produce professional lawyers. In addition to the litigating lawyer, who argues before the court of law, the term “professional lawyer” also include all persons trained in law, who is either the employment or services are directly or indirectly dependent on their degrees in law. The aim of legal education should be not only to produce good lawyers but also to create cultured law abiding citizens who are inculcated with concepts of human values and human rights; who can serve humanity in various capacities such as administrators, law teachers, jurists, judges and industrial entrepreneurs, arbitrators etc. The legal education should aim at equipping law students with legal techniques and professional skills.
Various organizations including academic institutions and statutory authorities have described various aims of legal education in their context and relevance. 2 The committee of legal education of the Harvard Law School lays emphasis on double purpose
1 https://vivekavani.com accessed on 24 April 2025
2 D.N MISHRA, LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA- PRESENT STATUS AND PROSPECTUS 19 (1999)
of a law school. (1) To train men for the legal profession, and (2) To provide a centre where scholars might contribute to an understanding of law and government and participate creatively in their growth and improvement. Mr. Dean Wright of the University of Toronto suggested three objectives of a law school (a) Education in the qualities that should be found in legal practitioners, (b) Education which would train a man not merely in the work of solving problems of individual clients but of the society in which he lives, and (c)To act as a Centre of research and criticism and contribution to the better understanding of the laws by which societies are held together.
Lord Denning in his address to the society of Public Teachers of Law expressed three purposes of legal education (a) To show how legal rules have developed, the reasons underlying them and the nexus between legal and social history, (b) To extract the principles underlying the existing legal rules, and (c) To point the right road for future development Dr. Mohammad Farogh in his observations on legal education in a modern civilized society wants to include the following aims and objective:-3 (1) To inculcate students with the operative legal rules, both substantive and procedural, (2) To provide the students with adequate experience to apply these rules, (3) To equip the students with sufficient knowledge of the historical and sociological
3 FAROQUE MAHAMMED, LEGAL EDUCATION CONTEMPORARY TRENDS AND
CHALLENGES 6
(1998)
background
of the country’s legal system, (4) To provide the students with some knowledge of the other legal system of the world so that the students do not find themselves at a complete loss when it comes to adopting a comparative approach, (5) Very significantly, the students should be encouraged to participate in discussions, seminars and challenge the very premise of legal concepts and their applications. Legal education should aim at furnishing skills and competence, the basic philosophies and ideologies for creation and maintenance of just society. 4 The aim of legal education is to bring out among students the aptitude, interest, commitment, skills and knowledge necessary to perform variety of roles in society including works for socially excluded people and the poor at the local level, and to ensure social justice.
India being a developing country needs to improve legal education in order to go in hand with the present competitive world.
3. LEGAL EDUCATION SYSTEM IN INDIA
In India, the government and concerned agencies since independence have been very consistent in focusing attention to legal education. The Constitution of India which has specifically laid down the responsibility of imparting schooling on the States by placing the problem relating to education in List II of the Seventh Schedule. Following Indian Law Commission's recommendation on legal education in mid-fifties, Advocates Act, 1961 entitled the Bar Council of India (BCI) to take necessary steps to improve and supervise legal education in India. Since then BCI is regulating the legal education in India. 5 The opportunity for quality legal education in India were limited till the early 1920s. it had changed after the drastic step taken by the BCI. They established National Law School at Bengaluru under the NLSIU Act, 1986 as a five-year course. It was introduced by Prof. (Dr. ) N.
R Madhava Menon6 which brought a paradigm shift in legal education as for the first time
4 AZMI HASANT, LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA 43 (1999)
5 http://www.barcouncilofindia.org/ accessed on 20 April 2025.
6 N R MADHAVA MENON, A HANDBOOK OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION (Eastern Book Company,
Lucknow, 1978) in the LL. B course was a part of the undergraduate program. Consequently, this reform in National Law School of India University, Bangalore was followed by other States too. Within a span of thirty years, many Indian States came up with their own distinctive National Law Universities. It has brought a positive effect on the legal education in India. Also the Bar Council of India Trust was created by BCI on 1974 to establish quality law schools, to promote teaching and research in law, to provide legal to the poor and needy one, scholarships to students who need it, to publish law books and reports for providing knowledge to the students. 7 Apart from that BCI grants recognition to universities and also visits and inspects universities or law colleges. Earlier the Curriculum Development Committee report on legal education was published by UGC.
Now the report is going to be published by BCI and they have submitted its volume 1 in 2010. The BCI Rules on Legal Education 2008, requires that every educational institution in India imparting instruction in law, be that a university or a law college affiliated to a university, shall be approves and enlisted by the BCI. 8 In this way BCI is making efforts to develop the legal education in India. The National Education Policy enacted in 2020 suggested that legal education must be multilingual. This would help in documentation of various important documents in the regional language especially in the lower district courts. Another aspect is now a particular language is not forced on the student. Now they understand and comprehend law in their mother tongue.
Since they are being trained the legal know-how in their own language students will be able to comprehend and resolve issues at grass root level. Though it is a commendable development, problem will arise in the implementation of the said suggestion as the main spoken language throughout the High Courts and Supreme Court is English. This might also hinder competition at international level. 9
4 CHALLENGES
IN THE INDIAN LEGAL SYSTEM After the reforms in the field of legal education, there aroused a tremendous change in the legal
7 Conference of Vice-Chancellors of National Law Universities on Legal Education Reforms
8 Rule 3, BCI Rules on Legal Education 2008.
9 National Education Policy 2020,
https://www. education. gov. in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0. pdf accessed on 20 April 2025. education in India. Both five year and three year LLB courses and LL. M were successfully implemented. As change is an inevitable process, during the passage of time drastic changes were happened in the field of legal education. The system should be updated according to the changing needs of the society, otherwise it will negatively affect future legal education in India. In the present scenario, during to the stagnancy in the reforms legal education is facing various kinds of challenges. • Improper Infrastructure With the technological advancement and increase in demand of law courses, this stagnancy creates a difficulty in catering the needs.
The CDC report has suggested to have elaborate infrastructure to law colleges including proper library, moot court hall, computer lab etc. 10 Apart from that BCI also have given instructions to law colleges to fulfil the infrastructure facilities. But to a certain extent, these instructions are not completely fulfilled by the most of the law colleges in India. The government law colleges failing to meet these criteria because of lack of fund given by the respective governments. In the case of private colleges, they are meeting these facilities by putting burden on students in the form of acquiring huge amount of fees. • Unavailability of qualified and proficient teaching faculty In the recent time there is huge increase in the introduction of private law colleges. Being private, most of them are profited oriented, which hires teaching faculties in low salary packages.
It has resulted a deficiency of qualified teachers. The qualified teachers will go for job with low salary. Despite of a compulsory minimum entry-level requisite national eligibility test to become a law teacher, many law colleges appoint them who do not even clear the eligibility test. These colleges do not have acceptable selection criteria for the appointment of law faculty and this help those faculties to gain a year experience before they can apply somewhere else. 11 In the case of government law colleges, most of the vacancies are not even reported to the concerned department. 10 Bar Council of India, https://www. barcouncilofindia. org/info/curriculum-ehprd9 accessed on 19 April 2025. 11 K. Singh, Legal Education in the New Millennium, 31(1) Indian Socio-Legal Journal 103, 108 (2005).
Outdated Curricula and Syllabi There is a need to update the syllabus periodically according to the needs of the society. Legal education is one which is used to provide social development to the society. Therefore, it needs to flow along with the society. In this regard, the UGC and BCI have repeatedly requested universities to revise their syllabi but they are not making any efforts on it. Apart from that the CDC report provided an enlarged course design for LLB courses. But universities are not taking efforts to revise the syllabus and many repealed laws still studying in the various law colleges in India. 12 • Method of teaching Even though the legal education is still in a developing stage, there is a need to change the method of teaching. Legal profession is not like engineering or medicine where they less interaction with the society and its people.
Here the advocates arguing for justice to its people and communication plays an important role. Therefore, discussion method and nonconventional methods of teaching should be applied in legal education. But in India, most of the law colleges/schools are still following the lecture method. It has lowered the quality of law graduates thereby creates a challenge towards the legal education in India. • Differences in the law colleges The educational institutions in India providing legal education are different. There are law schools, law colleges and law universities. The regulatory authorities are providing instructions to these institutions in a general manner. It creates difficulty in implementing these instructions. For example, if a certain guideline on infrastructure is given by the BCI, then it cannot be implemented in the same manner in law colleges and law schools.
Also there is no uniformity in these institutions regarding the studying of law. Therefore, the quality of students from different institutions are different because of the disparity in the kind of education they receive. It also creates disturbances in ensuring social development. 12 Ankita Singh & Janmejay Singh, Challenges of Legal Education in the 21st Century, 4 INT'l J. L. MGMT. &
HUMAN. 2580 (2021).
Making Law Students Expert Learners What the law colleges have failed is to train the students to be a skillful learner. A more operational formative assessment in doctrinal course, the skill to be a lawyer and clinics may be used in order to better prepare students for the practice of law. The formative assessment process is used by the teachers to improve the meta-cognitive skills of law students so that their learning can be transferred to the new and novel situations that they face in the practice of law.13 The goal of formative assessment should be to move legal education away from a focus on an end product to the underlying process of developing these products. • Medium of Instruction
A number of institutions administer education at the undergraduate level in regional languages.
As a result, a number of candidates in certain States are admitted to colleges without even having some basic fluency in the English language. Admittedly, a mastery of the regional This is because the faculty has to be fluent in the language as well, which precludes the colleges from having good visiting faculty or guest lectures from eminent persons in the area. Moreover, most of the statutes, cases, books and other material are all in English. There are not enough text books in regional languages to overcome these setbacks. The BCI has tried to rectify this by providing that the medium of instruction shall be English but if it is not then it must meet the law graduate standard in order to qualify for enrolment as an advocate. Additionally, two papers on General English and one on Legal Language have to be compulsorily administered under the new scheme.
• The Legal Research and Writing Instructions and Technology The course called Legal Method is not introduced in 3-year law course in some of the universities. But in all the 5-year integrated law courses, this course is compulsorily taught. This course instruction needs to be improved. The changes in legal research methods and instruction will certainly come with the increasingly rapid acceleration in the amount and kinds
13 ROBIN K MILLS, LEGAL RESEARCH INSTRUCTION IN LAW SCHOOLS THE STATE OF THE ART,
633 2nd edn, (ILI, New Delhi, 2001).
of legal research materials being produced14. Another reason to anticipate significant changes in the way legal research and writing will be taught is, of course, the development of computerized legal research such as LEXIS and WEST LAW. There are different online databases for developing knowledge of the law students and they are very expensive. In many law schools or law colleges, they are paying it for the improvement in legal education. But still most of law colleges mainly the private colleges are not investing their money on online databases. • Issues in Internship programme The universities provides a well defined academic calendar for various courses including legal platform too. The academic calendar will help the student to get an idea about the course, and will guide them in completing the course in an effective manner by planning and organising their studies accordingly.
Law graduation courses provides internship programmes and clinical legal education in their syllabus. The internship programmes are provided for getting the practical knowledge of the respective subject and also it will give help the student to develop their skill which is highly necessary in building a law graduate. But most of the universities doesn’t provide internship programmes and those having it is not seen in a full fledged manner. The internship programmes are structured in such a manner as it is spread across the entire semesters. Due to this, the students will not able to meet the purpose of internship in an effective way. Like other professional courses in law courses too, the students after completion of their course are entering into the real world where they need to tackle the real life facts and issues with the help of law.
But by providing ineffective internship programmes, the law graduates are facing issues in handling their profession and it gives a negative impact to their professional life as well as creates imbalance in the society. • Problems in examination system Today the examination systems are based on memory test not in a practical and analytical aspect. Almost every exam is conducted in the same fixed pattern and those students who can easily tackle the pattern will pass the examination. In the legal education, important should be 14 Anthony Niedwiecki, Teaching for Lifelong Learning: Improving The Metacognitive Skills Of Law Students Through More Effective Formative Assessment Techniques. given to the practical aspect. Because legal profession is based on the communicative and interactive skill of the law graduates.
By practising the conventional examination system, the quality of the students will be in a dilemma. All these creates hurdles on legal education in India. Law graduates are considered as social engineers. Their quality of education has a positive role in the development in the society. But these challenges are reducing the quality of legal education and thereby disturbs the social welfare.
5 CONCLUSION
AND SUGGESTIONS Legal education is an asset to the society as it will bring speediness in development of the society. India is a developing nation and it is still in a mushroom stage. There are many disparities and discrimination among people. It causes justice violation towards the minority group and socially indigenous people. In this area legal education will act as weapon to protect the rights of the needy in providing justice. Therefore, legal education has an important role in the overall development of society. There is no doubt that there is a drastic change in the legal education from the few past years but in order to make it more effective and justice oriented, some reforms are there which still need to take place. In this initial period of legal education, we have witnessed a speedy development in this area.
But now the society is moving in a speedy manner, but legal education is still in a stagnant stage. It creates various challenges and there is an urgent need to resolve it. Suggestions: • The regulatory authorities i. e. BCI, UGC, central government and state government should provide proper guidelines to the development of the legal education. Also they have to monitor the activities of universities and law colleges. • The syllabus should be updated periodically according to the existing laws. • Teaching should be more towards in a practical manner. Moot court, Adalat, internship etc should be effectively implemented. There is a need introduce practical from the first year itself. Also the teachers should give training moot court presentations. It will bring confidence to the students. • Full fledged internship can be introduced like in medical courses.
By providing internship programme at the end of the course as a separate semester will help the students in getting full knowledge of the internship which they are doing. • Infrastructure facilities should be assured. The libraries should be equipped with enough books. If there is any shortage in these facilities, the concerned department should be revamp it immediately. Also the law college authorities should give invest in online databases and help the students to access it. • Law colleges should improve the quality of students by using best practices for assessment. They can make use criteria-referenced assessments, multiple formative and summative assessments and various methods of assessment which supports the legal education. The assessments should be conducted in a regular manner in order improve the knowledge of students.
• It is the duty of law colleges to impart importance of ethics to its students. There are practical paper on professional ethics for law students, but it is giving that much importance. It will bring law graduates who are unethical towards the society. • The law students can be provided an opportunity to lawyers, judges and officials who are engaging in the field of law. Law is the one which bring justice and development to the society. it is applied in the society by the law graduates. Therefore, they have an important role in the society. Any unethical practice by a judge or an advocate cause injustice in the society. The law students should be groomed properly before graduation. They are not like other professional. They are one who interact directly with the society. Therefore, the legal education plays an important role in the society.
There is need to bring reforms in legal education changing world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
D.N MISHRA, LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA- PRESENT STATUS AND
PROSPECTUS 19 (1999)
FAROQUE MAHAMMED, LEGAL EDUCATION CONTEMPORARY TRENDS
AND CHALLENGES 6 (1998)
AZMI HASANT, LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA 43 (1999)
ROBIN K MILLS, LEGAL RESEARCH INSTRUCTION IN LAW SCHOOLS THE
STATE OF THE ART, 633 2nd edn, (ILI, New Delhi, 2001).
N R MADHAVA MENON, A HANDBOOK OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION
(Eastern Book Company, Lucknow, 1978) • K. Singh, Legal Education in the New Millennium, 31(1) Indian Socio-Legal Journal 103, 108 (2005). • Ankita Singh & Janmejay Singh, Challenges of Legal Education in the 21st Century, 4 INT'l J.L. MGMT. & HUMAN. 2580 (2021). • Anthony Niedwiecki, Teaching for Lifelong Learning: Improving The Metacognitive Skills Of Law Students Through More Effective Formative Assessment Techniques. • BCI Rules on Legal Education 2008. • Curriculum Development Committee Report 2010. • https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf • http://www.barcouncilofindia.org/ • https://vivekavani.com • https://www.barcouncilofindia.org/info/curriculum-ehprd9