Introduction:

Legal Education hasn’t undergone any fundamental change during the last 150 years. Except for the
duration of the courses, and addition of some fundamental subjects, there has been minimal innovation
in legal education scenario during all these years. Legal Education in India has remained mostly
concentrated on developing legal professionals in a national context. Legal Education has more or less
remained a theoretical study, with only minimal content of practical exposure. Experiential learning was
given a back bench in actual practice, and many practical courses remain in paper rather than in
content. National law school experiment in India which has to an extent revived the interest in legal
education has remained elitist and out of reach for children from middle and lower income group.

Since the past few years the roles of lawyers have drastically changed in the society. In the changed
scenario, the additional roles envisaged are that of policy planner, business advisor, negotiator among
interest groups, expert in articulation and communication of ideas, mediator, lobbyist, law reformer, etc.
These roles demand specialised knowledge and skills not ordinarily available in the existing profession.
These roles have moved away from being localised and started moving beyond national boundaries.
As a result a new genre of globalised legal professionals has evolved who while having a firm
understanding of local legal scenario, was able to extend its principles to a global context.

Current State of Indian Legal Education:

While a lot is currently being discussed about the state of legal education in India, with reports from
National Knowledge Commission, Law Commission of India, Legal Education Committee of the Bar
Council of India, University Grants Committee Special Committee on Legal Education, Expert
Committee Appointed by Supreme Court and some state governments [5] it is necessary to draw a
sketch of the existing legal education frame work in India.

Currently, law is being looked upon as a national subject. The content of law courses prescribed by the
regulators is focused on the national laws rather than on the essential principles. As a result the vision
of law students get often confined to national boundaries. On the other hand, the globalisation has made
the distinction between various systems of law meaningless, and new avenues in international law, like
international criminal law and International Space Law, has cut across national borders.

The Origin of the Task Force

In 1987, at a conference "celebrat[ing] twenty years of effort and achievement since
the Ford Foundation . . . set in motion the clinical education movement,"6 Justice
Rosalie Wahl of the Minnesota Supreme Court, the Chair of the ABA Section of Legal
Education and Admissions to the Bar, asked those in attendance to "recommit
themselves 'to certain basic principles,' including that of teaching students how to learn
systematically from experience and simultaneously to educate them in a broader
range of legal analysis and skills than have traditionally been taught."7 She asked,
"'[h]ave we really tried to determine . . . what skills, what attitudes, what character
traits, what qualities of mind are required of lawyers?'" In early 1989, Justice Wahl
created the Task Force to answer these questions. 9 After collecting data, holding
public hearings, and conducting extensive deliberations over a period of almost three
years, the Task Force issued the Report in July 1992.

Robert MacCrate was an American lawyer who served as Counsel to New York
Governor Nelson D. Rockefeller. He served as president of both the New York State
 Bar Association and the American Bar Association ("ABA"). MacCrate later chaired
the ABA Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession. The Task Force's Report,
widely known as the MacCrate Report, was issued in July 1992

The MacCrate Report

Sources - Statement of Fundamental Lawyering Skills and Values ("SSV") - Preamble
to the ABA Model Rules.
• American Bar Association’s “Report of The Task Force on Law Schools and the
Profession: Narrowing the Gap” dated July 1992 , popularly known as The Mac Crate
Report is one such work.
• The report, Legal Education and Professional Development - An Educational
Continuum (1992) better known in the law profession as "The Mac Crate Report
• The Report describes the progressive evolution of the legal
• profession to its current position of prominence. In the early
• nineteenth century, the Bar first began to develop the institutional framework
for self-regulation: law schools, bar associations, and judicial supervision."
•
• The report provided a list of the fundamental skills one must possess for competence,
but it also placed in context the continuum nature of professional legal education1
• With the backing of the ABA Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession, the
MacCrate Report criticized the state of American legal education and called for a
practice-oriented, rather than theory-oriented, approach to legal education.
• Specifically, the MacCrate Report suggested mandatory externships with government
agencies, judges, and pro bono legal assistance clinics.
• It also encouraged state Bar associations to alter Bar examinations to focus more on
practice-oriented skills rather than rhetoric and legal maxims, "to ensure that
applicants are ready to assume their responsibilities in practice.
• While the MacCrate Report is widely viewed as the template for modern legal
education in the United States, many traditional and high-ranking law schools have
yet to adopt many of its recommendations.
• 184th Law Commission Report
• The National Law School, Bangalore is said to have prepared a new curriculum in
2001 based on the Mac Crate and Harvard curriculum, with modifications suited for
Indian conditions.2

• There are 10 chapters in the Mac Crate Report in Parts I to III.

• Chapter 5 of the Report refers to the 'Statement of Fundamental Lawyers Skills and Professional
Values"',
• Chapter 7 refers to 'Professional Development during Law School',
• Chapter 8 to 'Transition from Law Student to Practitioner,
• Chapter 9 to 'Professional Development after Law School',

1
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED382142.pdf
2
https://indiankanoon.org/doc/60046619/
• Chapter 10 refers to the Need for a National Institute to Enhance the process of Professional
Development

Under chapter V(A) legal skills referred are

(1) legal research, (2) factual investigation, (3) communication, (4) counselling, (5)
negotiation, (6) skills required to employ or to advise a client about the options of
litigation and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, (7) the skill to identify the
administrative skills necessary to organize and manage legal work effectively and (8)
finally, the skill of analyzing the skills involved in recognizing and resolving ethical
dilemmas.
The Report also refers to the relationship between the 'skills' and the 'values'
• Professional values, according to the Mac Crate Report, include 'training in
professional responsibilities' and involve more than 'just the specifics of the Code of
Professional Responsibility and the Model Rules of Professional Conduct'; they should
encompass 'the values of the profession', including the 'obligations and accountability
of a professional dealing with the lives and affairs of clients'.
• These values are many, such as, (1) the value of competent representation,
analyzing the ideals to which a lawyer should be committed as a member of a
profession dedicated to the service of clients,
• (2) the value of striving to promote justice, fairness and morality; the ideals to
which a lawyer should be committed as a member of a profession that bears special
responsibilities for the quality of justice,
• (3) the value of striving to improve the profession; explore the ideals to which a
lawyer should be committed as a member of a 'self-governing' profession,
• (4) the value of professional self-development, analyzing the ideals to which the
lawyer should be committed as a member of a 'learned profession'.

• .In addition, the Mac Crate report focuses on some core professional skills, which a
law student should acquire during his legal education, which can be summarized as
follows:
1. Problem diagnosis
2. Identifying and formulating legal issues
3. Knowledge of nature of legal rules and institutions
4. Factual investigation skills.
5. Counselling
6. Negotiation
7. Advisory skills
8. Litigation skills
9. Efficient management skills
10. Ethical skills.
 Problems in Presentation of Values
a. Values as Second Priority
By listing the four Fundamental Values after the ten Fundamental Skills, the MacCrate
Report signaled that values are a lower priority than skills. 91 Indeed, if the Report had
followed
a logical order, it would have started with values. The values are the goals. Once those
were identified, the Report would have determined which skills were necessary to fulfill
those
goals. Why then did the Report place values after skills? Perhaps the Report reflects the
widely held perception that skills are more important than values.
b. Failure to Acknowledge the Ideology of Legal Academics
The Report also misses the ideological context of its proposals for implementation of
teaching values to law students. The Report starts from the view that law schools are doing
an exemplary job of teaching legal ethics. 140 To make the teaching of the ethics rules
and values more effective, the Report asks law schools to make clear to students that
learning values is as important as substantive knowledge. 14 1 The Report also asserts
that law schools are limited in their ability to teach values and accordingly makes practicing
lawyers responsible for teaching values to young lawyers, especially "to impress on
students that success in the practice of law is not measured by financial rewards alone,
but by a lawyer's commitment to a just, fair and moral society. " The Report's conception
of lawyers and law students bears little resemblance to the reality others have described.
As discussed above, it is absurd to ask practicing lawyers who, by and large, reject the
primacy of a duty to the public good to take responsibility for teaching that duty. 43
Similarly, erroneous is the Report's assumption that law schools are committed to this
goal.Contrary to the Report's glowing description of law schools' success in teaching legal
ethics is the legal academy's widely noted disdain for the topic. 145 As Roger Cramton
and Susan Koniak observe, despite the ABA's 1977 requirement to teach legal ethics and
the resulting growth of scholarship and case law, "legal ethics remains an unloved orphan
of legal education." 146 In the words of another commentator, legal ethics is "the dog of
the law school [curriculum]-hard to teach, disappointing to take, and often presented to
vacant seats or vacant minds."

I. INTRODUCTION
• Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, which quickly became
known as the “Carnegie Report,” appeared in 2007. Appearing shortly after another study
of law school pedagogy, the Best Practices in Legal Education by Roy Stuckey and
colleagues (“Best Practices”), and fifteen years following the milestone MacCrate Report
of the American Bar Association (ABA), Educating Lawyers became part of a large
controversy in the field of legal education over whether and how law schools needed to
change in order to meet professional demands and public
• Rather than a stand-alone survey of the field, Educating Lawyers was conceived and
developed as part of a larger set of investigations into education for various professions,
 the Preparation for the Professions Program initiated in the late 1990s by the Carnegie
Foundation’s then-president, Lee Shulman.
• The program carried out studies of the preparation of engineers, Jewish and Christian
clergy, nurses, and physicians, as well as an examination of how undergraduate
business programs included liberal education in their curricula.
• The studies shared two premises: that all fields of professional education would benefit
from the application of the insights of modern learning research and that careful
comparison of approaches among the several professional fields could yield valuable
insights for each of them.
• Taken together, these studies were efforts to examine professional preparation within
higher education, seeking not only to criticize where necessary but also to propose
“visions of the possible” based upon educators’ most creative and ambitious efforts to
address widely-perceived challenges.
• The studies were most concerned with how effectively the educational process can
prepare students to develop and bring together knowledge, skill, and moral purpose in
ways that advance the aims of the several professions within a democratic society.
• Educating Lawyers utilized a 1999 research project which included extensive fieldwork
conducted at sixteen law schools in the United States and Canada.
• A research team that included both legal professionals and scholars from outside legal
education visited a cross-section of institutions, public and private, ranging from coast to
coast, north to south, and including two Canadian law schools.
• While attentive to institutions often held to represent important strengths in legal
education, the sample included several among the more selective schools, several that
were free-standing, one historically African-American, while two others, one Canadian
and one American, were distinctive for their attention to Native American and First Nation
peoples and their concerns.
• three universal strands of professional education.
• These strand are metaphorically designated as three formative apprenticeships, all of
which are essential to full preparation for professional work.
• three apprenticeships of
• the Carnegie Report: doctrinal teaching, practice opportunities, and explicit
• initiatives concerning professionalism
• The first apprenticeship consists of intellectual training to learn the academic
knowledge base and the capacity to think in ways that are important to the profession. In
law schools, this was clearly the main focus of attention, as shown by the overwhelming
salience of case-dialogue teaching.
• The second apprenticeship of professional education is concerned with transmitting to
novices the skills and craft know-how that marks expert practitioners of the domain. The
study found that law schools disconnected this from the first apprenticeship and provided
it much less systematically through clinical-legal education, legal writing, etc.
• The third apprenticeship is concerned with providing entrants to the field effective ways
to engage and make their own the ethical standards, social roles, and responsibilities of
the profession, grounded in the profession’s fundamental purposes. In law schools, this
apprenticeship was generally marginal and often hard to clearly identify in the curriculum
or staffing plan
• Using the three-apprenticeship framework as a guide, the Carnegie Report made five
key findings:
• 1. Through the method of teaching case dialogue, law school promoted rapid
socialization into the standards of legal thinking—the often-referenced “thinking like a
lawyer.”
• 2. Law schools relied heavily on this one pedagogical method to accomplish their
objective of initiating students into the knowledge and practice of the profession.
• 3.The case-dialogue method possessed several strengths but also generated unintended
consequences of excessive reliance on this one form of teaching, specifically the failure
to provide systematic and effective training in the full range of capacities needed for legal
practice, and neglect of effective support for developing the ethical and contextual
dispositions essential to professional identity.
• 4. Law schools demonstrated an underdeveloped state of assessment,as compared with
other professional fields, and should pay more attention to the formative as well as the
summative uses of assessment in order to enhance student learning.
• 5. Legal education showed a structural disadvantage by approaching improvement only
incrementally, missing the advantages that come with pursuing educational development
in an integrated manner.
• The teaching of legal doctrine and analysis was to be fully integrated
• into the overall curriculum and student experience, including learning to
• “think like a lawyer” in simulated and real practice settings while also probing the
dimensions, demands, and aspirations of the profession. Noting the
• experience of medical education, the Carnegie Report stressed that the aim
• of professional formation could be most effectively achieved when ideas
• were explored in relation to students’ experience of taking on the responsibilities
inherent in the profession’s various roles. These integrative efforts
• were likely to be most effective when faculty with different strengths, such
• as clinical and doctrinal faculty, as well as legal writing and other staff,
• developed on-going, complementary relationships as legal educators