Bridging the Gap: Understanding the Trends in Indian Legal Education from Recent Developments

Abstract

The constitutional mandate of legal aid provides Indian law schools a unique opportunity to achieve the social justice mission of legal education. Taking cue from such holistic vision, Indian legal education aims to provide a fair, effective and accessible legal system to its citizens. Having said this, the euphoria of ideal legal education remains a distant dream with continuous declining standards in legal education impartation. There appear efforts to correct such decline, which led to the introduction of clinical legal education (CLE) as a mandatory component in the law school curriculum by way of mandatory practical papers. Also, the modern approach to legal education demands adoption of local circumstances while implementing ‘broadly shared aspirations’ and ‘goals of global level’. In this regard, this article covers three recent activities, which if clubbed together present wider scenes pertaining to the state of legal education and reforms in India. On a collective reading of all three events, this article argues for introducing continuing legal education (CLE) in India.