Reforming Indian Legal Education: Linking Research and Teaching

Abstract

For more than a half century, and certainly since Independence, the great minds in India have struggled to improve the nation’s institutions, including its legal systems and especially its law schools. These grand, well-intentioned and high-minded efforts by scholars, politicians, legal practitioners, jurists and even U.S. foundations, largely have foundered. In 1948, a notable reform effort focused on teachers of the law, aiming to improve law schools and the lives of students in part by elevating faculty scholarship; in the decades that followed, attention went to students, their classes and qualifications, or to efforts to provide model study plans and schools.1 Yet another chapter in this long effort has opened with the submission of the recommendations from a working group on legal education.2 These latest would-be reformers, summoned to their labors by the prime minister, no less, have emphasized the need to improve faculty and teaching standards in India’s legal academies. They have urged that law schools take a more rational view of legal educators’ work load and that they put greater emphasis on research and publication. This, of course, assumes that more research and publication also will boost the quality of teaching and faculty and raise the standards of legal education. History makes a different case and it is crucial to review the past and present state of Indian law schools before taking on what arguably are the necessary next challenges to fix or improve them. The legal Academy everywhere seeks to find that institutional alchemy, in which a perfect balance is struck among the needs of students and the duties of their faculty to research, publish, teach, and to make a living, all while practicing law in the wider world. Regrettably,

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