GS Paper II

News Excerpt:

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.

History 

• Since Independence, legal education, unlike medicine and engineering, has not been a top priority for India’s policymakers. 
• Things started to change for the better in the 1990s (buoyed by the winds of liberalisation and globalisation) with the advent of the national law universities (NLUs) in India. 

Recommendations 

• 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.
• 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. 
• 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.
• The committee emphasises the need to prioritise and promote research in legal education.
• As the committee remarks, augmenting the research ecosystem in our law schools undoubtedly involves a greater need for state funding.
• 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.

Need of a new regulator 

• Hundreds of other law schools nationwide  essentially represent a “sea of institutionalised mediocrity”. Most of the NLUs too, while successfully attracting excellent students, have failed to emerge as centres of excellence in legal research.
• 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.
• Many of India’s 1,700-odd law schools principally focus on teaching, with scant attention to research.
• Teaching, with scant attention to research is a big issue. 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 barely a handful are Indian law journals

Challenges 

• None of this will be implemented as long as higher education does not become the topmost priority for everyone.
• Legal education is considered as tough as other streams thus it does not attract students towards it.
• Lack of research and clarification of thoughts in this subject make it complex for non-legal background students.

Way Forward:

• 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.
• To boost the culture of legal research in our law schools, there should be complete academic freedom and autonomy.
• 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.