Aims and objectives of legal education

1. What legal education is for

Legal education is the systematic instruction of persons in law: its rules, its methods, its institutions, and the skills and values needed to work with it. It has at least three audiences: those who will practise law, those who will judge, teach or make policy, and citizens who need to understand the law that governs them. Its aims follow from which audience is in view.

2. The aims

1. Professional competence. To produce advocates, judges, corporate lawyers and law officers who know the law and can use it: research, drafting, advocacy, negotiation, counselling. This is the aim the Bar Council of India regulates under the Advocates Act, 1961.
2. Liberal education. To develop the capacity for critical reasoning, careful reading and clear argument, which is why law has long been studied by those who never practise. The five-year integrated degree rests partly on this aim: law taught alongside the social sciences and humanities.
3. Social justice. To produce lawyers who understand the society in which law operates and who will use law to protect the weak. In India this aim has constitutional roots: the Preamble’s promise of justice, Article 39A’s directive on equal justice and free legal aid, and the Fundamental Duties. Legal aid clinics are its working form.
4. Ethical formation. To instil the values of the profession — duty to the court, to the client, to the opponent and to the public. The BCI makes professional ethics a compulsory paper.
5. Research and law reform. To produce scholars who can study the working of law, criticise it and propose reform. This is the special aim of the LL.M. and Ph.D.
6. Preparing for a globalised practice. International trade, investment, arbitration and technology law require lawyers trained in comparative and international law.
7. Public legal literacy. Spreading awareness of rights through legal literacy camps, a duty also placed on legal services authorities.

3. The competing models

The vocational model sees the law school as the first stage of professional training. It emphasises skills and the rules practitioners need. Its risk is narrowness: graduates who can draft a plaint but cannot ask whether the law is just.

The academic model sees law as a field of knowledge to be studied critically, historically and comparatively. William Twining’s Blackstone’s Tower (1994), on the English law school, defends this view while recognising the pull of the profession. Its risk is detachment from practice.

The social-justice model, argued in India by Upendra Baxi and N.R. Madhava Menon, asks that legal education be socially relevant: it should prepare lawyers to serve the large majority who are poor, and should study the gap between law and its working. Baxi’s work for the UGC in the late 1970s on a socially relevant legal education is the classic Indian statement.

4. Comparative statements of aims

• United Kingdom. The Ormrod Committee on Legal Education (1971) divided training into an academic stage (the law degree), a vocational stage (professional courses) and continuing education. The division still shapes English legal education, now under the Solicitors Qualifying Examination for solicitors.
• United States. The American Bar Association’s MacCrate Report (1992) listed fundamental lawyering skills (problem-solving, legal analysis, research, factual investigation, communication, counselling, negotiation, litigation and ADR, practice management, and recognising ethical dilemmas) and values, and asked law schools to teach them. The Carnegie Foundation’s Educating Lawyers (2007) argued that legal education should integrate three “apprenticeships”: intellectual (legal analysis), practical (skills) and professional identity (ethics and purpose).
• The disjunction thesis. Judge Harry Edwards, in “The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession” (1992), complained that elite American law schools had moved towards abstract theory of little use to judges and practitioners, while firms had become commercial and neglected ethics. The article is still the standard reference for the tension between academic and professional aims.

5. The Indian position

The Supreme Court has tied legal education to the constitutional scheme of justice. In State of Maharashtra v. Manubhai Pragaji Vashi, 1995 INSC 463, (1995) 5 SCC 730, it held that Article 21 read with Article 39A casts a duty on the State to give grant-in-aid to recognised private law colleges, on the same footing as other faculties. The reasoning was that free legal aid and access to justice need a supply of competent lawyers, which needs properly funded law colleges. Legal education is thus a means to a constitutional end, not merely a professional matter.

The Law Commission’s 184th Report (2002) on legal education and professional training recommended raising standards of law schools and a stronger role for the UGC alongside the BCI. The National Education Policy 2020 asks that legal education be competitive globally while being informed by Indian constitutional values and the social context, and that it be offered bilingually.

6. A synthesis

The aims are best seen as layers. The base is knowledge of law. On it rest skills (research, writing, advocacy), understanding (the social, economic and political context of law), and values (ethics and the commitment to justice). The LL.M. adds scholarship: the ability to produce new knowledge about law. Each teaching method serves some layers better than others: the lecture conveys knowledge, the case and problem methods develop analysis, the clinic develops skills and values, and the dissertation develops research.

How this is examined

As part of “Explain the history and development of legal education in India and highlight the objects of legal education” (January 2024), or alone as “Discuss the aims of legal education”. List the seven aims, set out the competing models, cite Ormrod, MacCrate or Carnegie and Edwards for comparison, and end with Manubhai Pragaji Vashi and Article 39A. The history is in the next note.