Professional Documents
Culture Documents
develop the human resources and idealism needed to strengthen the legal system ….A
lawyer, a product of such education would be able to contribute to national development and
social change in a much more constructive manner.”1
Legal education became almost a no man’s land in view of the fact that the 1961 Act
authorised the Bar Council of India to regulate the standard of legal education while the
universities and colleges were treating legal education as a money-making avenue. Colleges
were started at the behest of politicians, judges and lawyers. The situation became so bad and
out of control that no experiment for standardisation was possible2.
According to Section 7(h) and (i) of the Advocates Act, 1961, the Bar Council has the
following two functions:
(h) to promote legal education and to lay down standards of such education in
consultation with the universities in India imparting such education and the State Bar
Councils; (i)to recognise universities whose degree in law shall be qualification for enrolment
as an advocate and for that purpose to visit and inspect universities.
The University Grants Commission (UGC), which is the apex body to regulate and
standardize university education, is equally responsible for legal education. The UGC has a
panel on legal education which is composed of twelve academicians from various parts of the
country, and is presided over by a retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India
Section 3 of the University Grants Commission Act, 1956.
“The Central Government may, on the advice of the Commission, declare by notification in
the Official Gazette, that any institution for higher education other than a University, shall be
deemed to be a University for the purposes of this Act...”
The goals and priorities of a law school need to be set in the context of its overall mission, the
national system of legal education, and specific conditions and trends at local, regional,
national, and international levels.
The creation of the national law schools in the late 80s was a "massive leap" forward for legal
education and coupled with the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the 90s, this had made
law an attractive career for young Indians for the first time. Private universities receive no
government funding and rely entirely on fees and investors.
Most controversial quota is the Management quota according to the advocaters of Pro-caste
reservation people. It is also been seriously criticised by leading educationalists as it is a
quota based on economic status irrespective of caste,race and religion as anybody who has
money can buy his seat. It reserves about 15 % seats in private colleges for the students who
are decided by the college management's own criteria. The criteria involves the colleges own
entrance exam or minimum %age of 10+2 legally.
The battle over appointments and promotions is, however, only one portion of the struggle for
control of modem universities. One should pay equal attention to the nature of academic
inquiry and social discourse within the university, for the change in the composition of
university faculties has brought with it strong pressures to reexamine the customary practices
of doing business. This is especially true in the humanities, the social sciences, and of course,
in the law, given the close connection between legal rules and political power.
Academics now import principles from econom-ics, political theory, sociology, history, and
more recently from feminism and critical race studies, so much so that some scholars wonder
whether anything is left to law as an autonomous discipline.
1
S.P.Sathe, “ Access to legal education and the legal profession in India” in R.Dhavan, N.Kibble and W.Twinner
(ed.) Access to Legal Education and Legal Profession 165 (1989)
2
N.L.Mitra, “Legal Education in India” in the Conference of International Legal Educators, May 24-27, 2000.
Given the nature of legal discourse, its academic objectives, and the possibilities of acquiring
shared knowledge, it seems clear that no one should be excluded from participation for
reasons of race or sex, and that we should exercise the utmost caution before giving anyone
special preference, deference, or voice for those reasons. the state should play no role in
shaping the internal rules of universities and other private institution.
Now, paradoxically, as the doors of universities are opened wider than ever before, the
opposite process has started to creep in. Over and over again, within the university there is an
effort to first divide intellectual inquiry, and then human knowledge, such that certain
members of academia are ineligible to participate in the common discourse, at least on
matters regarding two of the most explosive issues of our time, race and sex. There is, of
course, something of an irony here. Any effort to develop a set of public and coercive norms
instructing private institutions whom they should hire, whom they should serve, or how their
internal constitutions should be organized often backfires in painful illustration of the general
principle of unintended consequence.
the inquiry faced by any law school, university, or indeed any private institution, is quite
different: How do we choose to govern ourselves? The principle of autonomy gives no clues
about how to answer this question of internal choice, or how these institutions should be
organized. All too often, the academic response to any hard question of appropriate conduct
is to suggest that it be left to the market, but in this instance, lawyers and law professors are
not in their habitual position of seeking to regulate the conduct of others. As members of
faculties, they constitute "the market," and it is their job to find the set of rules that should
govern the internal life of the institutions to which they belong.
The market for ideas has become increasingly compartmentalized, so that some of us are not,
quite literally, allowed to trespass in fields occupied by others. It is not uncommon for
scholars to claim that their positions should be immune to criticism by persons outside their
experiential circles; for such per-sons do not possess the special insights and understanding
that are necessary to deal with the issues in question.
The Private Universities Bill was introduced in the Parliament in August 1995. Yet, this bill
has not been passed. However, the reason for this is not that the government does not wosh to
privatise higher education, but it is because the private universities do not agree with certain
terms of this bill. The bill requires the formation of a permanent endowment fund of Rs 10
crores, provision of full scholarships to 30 percent of the students, and for government
monitoring and regulation of the system. Due to the unethical and illegal practices followed
in private universities, they are often taken over either partially or completely by the
government.
NLUs are administratively more autonomous than non-NLUs, which must go through the
university they are affiliated with to see most administrative processes through. NLUs have a
significantly greater financial resources, facilitated by their significantly higher tuition fees.
Dr N R Madhava Menon- “the major impediment to reforming legal education is a lack of
vision and commitment, not a lack of resources”
The problem with the existence of private law schools is that they follow different
curriculums. As a result, there is a disparity in the legal education system throughout the
country. the curriculum which has been adopted by the National Law school of India
University, Bangalore is based on the highly regarded Mac Crate and Harvard curriculum,
with modifications suited for Indian conditions.
The private universities tend to demarcate law courses from non-law courses, whereas NLUs
have integrated legal and non-legal papers from the beginning. NLUs have an ongoing
evaluation system through projects, essays, papers etc., whereas private universities tend to
have only end-term exams.
Quality of teachers is a main issue that is haunting private law schools. The process of
producing quality law teachers goes hand in hand with undertaking quality legal research. It
is even more difficult to motivate the best law students to undertake post-graduate research in
the first place n order to become legal academicians.
need to train them in various other areas besides educating them. We have to train them in the
areas of research, capacity building, community service and outreach. It is my experience that
in most law schools, a lot of emphasis is laid down on teaching advocacy and oratorical skills
as well as on mooting techniques, whereas hardly any attention is paid towards developing
research potential amongst the law students.
we have to go a long way in educating the students in the law schools and inculcating in them
a great sense of dedication, discipline, client’s cause, community responsibility and social
accountability.
"The portals of our law teaching institutions manned by part-time teachers open even wider
and are accessible to any graduate of mediocre ability and indifferent merits.
The situation has further worsened with mushroom growth of ill-equipped law colleges
housed in dingy rooms with skeleton libraries and lacking in adequate and trained staff. Some
of them function as short duration evening classes. These can more appropriately be
described as fee collection centres rather than law colleges. Some of these colleges do not
insist on regular attendance by students, presumably because either the accommodation is
insufficient or the staff strength is inadequate3
The presence of a large number of such 'drifters' can hardly generate an atmosphere
conducive to a centre of learning. Their casual approach would only dampen the enthusiasm
of other students as well as the teachers, causing environmental degradation. Added to that is
the fact that at certain examination centres there is no supervision for fear of violence and the
examination results are extremely liberal. As one Principal of a law college put it: "It is
difficult to fail". What then is the scenario?: Ill-equipped Law Colleges; a large body of
students being 'drifters' to the law course on their failing to secure admission to the
disciplines of their choice; training personnel lacking in competence and knowledge; access
to knowledge being limited on account of want of proper libraries; absence of proper filtering
with extra-liberal examination results.
Unless we face the bitter truth and come to grips with it, we cannot hope to improve the legal
education system. We have failed to attend to the cracks which have since widened and if we
fail to take urgent remedial measures, posterity may not pardon us. Such a situation cannot be
allowed to continue as it is fraught with serious consequences; it will not only cause
irreparable harm to the legal system but will in the long run shake the very foundations of
democracy and the rule of law on which our constitutional government rests.
After the enactment of Advocates Act, 1961 it was noticed that there was a mushroom growth
of sub-standard law schools, with hardly any regard to the quality of legal education.
Admission to these law schools was easy. Minimum marks prescribed for eligibility for
admission to the law course were as low as 33% or 40% and the result was that thousands of
students became eligible and all of them, including the last eligible candidate, got admission.
A student who could not get admission in any other course would join law course. The
quality of the teaching staff in those law schools also left much to be desired. Most of the law
schools and colleges had only part-time law teachers, with an exception of a few whole-time
teachers. There was, thus, hardly any commitment of the teaching staff to the cause of legal
education. The sudden spurt in the number of law schools with almost free admission to law
schools and the lack of infrastructural facilities and non-availability of high quality teaching
staff took its toll on the quality of law graduates churned out by these law schools which in
turn affected the quality of the standards of the Bar. Since, many of these law schools could
3
http://www.ebc-india.com/lawyer/articles/93v1a2.htm
not house the total number of students enrolled for want of adequate classrooms and non-
maintenance of teacher-student ratio, the administration of many of such law schools
encouraged absenteeism. In many law schools there were more "absentees" than "present".
Neither the school nor the students took law study seriously. Students could live hundreds of
miles away from colleges and not only get full attendance but degrees too. Legal education as
a matter of fact became only a profit-making industry.4
In the case Unni Krishnan, J.P. v. State of A.P the Supreme Court expressed its concern and
firmly laid down that "education cannot be allowed to be converted into commerce”
Unless such a drastic surgery is undertaken without loss of time, the patient, that is legal
education, will be fatally wounded and consequently the country's justice delivery system
will stand bereaved
Such semi-privatization creates dilemmas for institutions that are largely dependent on fee-
income, but are committed to policies of enhancing educational opportunities.
As such, it is for the Universities to control the quality of legal education that is imparted to
the law graduates. Unfortunately, almost all the Indian law schools, whether having three
year or five year law courses, suffer from acute academic anaemia. Qualified full time
teachers are not available, libraries are virtually non-existent, there is staggering enrolment,
absentee students, mass copying at examinations, absence of adequate physical and financial
resources - all these pile up as problems of legal institutions. The danger of the five year
course is that if the course is not properly conducted, there may be a higher degree of
frustration.
4
1998 3 SCC (Jour) 1