An intervention that will help strengthen legal education (GS Paper 2, Education)
Context:
- The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law, and Justice recently submitted a significant report on legal education, making several path-breaking recommendations to strengthen the quality of legal education in India.
- Since Independence, legal education, unlike medicine and engineering, has not been a top priority for India’s policymakers.
Advent of NLUs:
- Things started to change for the better in the 1990s with the advent of the National Law Universities (NLUs) in India.
- The Indian economy in the 1990s threw up many new opportunities for lawyers, which, in turn, led to bright young students opting to study law right after school.
- Most of the NLUs too have failed to emerge as centres of excellence in legal research. This is borne by the fact that only two Indian law schools, Jindal Global Law School and National Law School of India University, figure in the QS rankings of the top 250 law schools worldwide.
Bar Council of India (BCI):
- Against this backdrop, a key recommendation of the committee is to limit the powers of the Bar Council of India (BCI) to regulate legal education. The BCI’s role in regulating legal education that pertains to acquiring basic eligibility to practise in the courts is indispensable.
- However, several other facets of legal education, especially at the post-graduation level, do not pertain to litigation.
- The committee recommends that regulating these parts of legal education should be entrusted to an independent body called the National Council for Legal Education and Research (NCLER). This proposed body will develop qualitative benchmarks to regulate legal education.
- Eminent legal academicians who deposed before the parliamentary committee batted for the creation of the NCLER. In addition to judges and practising lawyers, the NCLER should have eminent law professors with an unimpeachable track record of research and serving legal education.
Focus on research:
- Many of India’s 1,700-odd law schools principally focus on teaching, with scant attention to research. Consequently, India is chiefly the consumer of legal knowledge generated in the West, not its producer.
- Out of more than 800 law journals globally indexed in Scopus (an internationally recognised database that lists leading journals in all fields) barely a handful are Indian law journals. This shows the abysmally poor level of research in India’s law schools.
- The committee emphasises the need to prioritise and promote research in legal education, which, in turn, will lead to better teaching outcomes and help students develop a critical perspective.
- As the committee remarks, augmenting the research ecosystem in our law schools undoubtedly involves a greater need for state funding. Bolstering research will also equip India’s law schools to thrive in the globalising world.
- The committee is cognisant of the effect of globalisation on legal education. It thus correctly recommends developing and delivering a global curriculum, promoting student and faculty international exchange programmes, incorporating more international law courses in the curriculum, and increasing students’ exposure to different legal systems.
What needs to be done?
- The leadership positions in our university’s law faculties and law schools should be held by passionate, charismatic, and visionary academicians who inspire and create an enabling and supportive environment that allows younger academicians to realise their potential as outstanding teachers and brilliant researchers.
- Sadly, barring a few notable exceptions, the deans of law faculties and vice-chancellors of law universities in India have failed to provide professional leadership.
- These flawed academic leaders detest talented professors and are the biggest bottleneck in striving for excellence. No amount of money or perks can overcome such a primary institutional deficiency.
Autonomy:
- To boost the culture of legal research in our law schools, there should be complete academic freedom and autonomy.
- As Jawaharlal Nehru said, “a university stands for humanism, for tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas and for the search of truth”.
- A law school or any other academic institution can accomplish this goal only if academicians are free to offer their well-researched views without any fear, even if these views are at variance with popularly held beliefs in society or contest the dominant ideas of the time.
Way Forward:
- The parliamentary committee’s intervention is a welcome development, and one expects all stakeholders to work together to improve the quality of legal education in India.
