CLR, ‘rebellious lawyering’, and justice education: A few lessons from Bangladesh

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, there has been a noticeable movement in legal education, especially in the common law countries, to transform it into justice education. While ‘legal education’ in its traditional connotation refers to teaching and learning of the black letter laws, mainly for litigation purposes, justice education ventures well beyond traditional legal education to incorporate ideas of human dignity, empowerment of the poor and the marginalised including their access to justice to make the education socially relevant. The article argues that, despite having certain common features, justice education, both in content and in procedure, is fundamentally different in the global North and South, more so in countries of South Asia with massive poverty and ever-widening gaps between the rich and the poor. The article discusses a particular component of justice education in Bangladesh, the Community Law Reform Programme, popularly known as CLR, which has been experimented with and practised for almost two decades. The article demonstrates how CLR is different from other socio-legal researches and why it should be considered as an effective way of pursuing justice education for law students. The experience of CLR in Bangladesh since 2001 provides enough evidence to conclude that for justice education to be meaningful in societies like Bangladesh, it has to incorporate CLR in its curriculum. Finally, the article analyses how it has proven to be a challenge to incorporate CLR in the mainstream law school curriculum (even as a clinical component), despite its intricate relation to ‘rebellious lawyering’ as distinct from ‘generic/traditional’ lawyering.