Envisioning a Face-Lift: Legal Education for Human Development

Abstract

The debates around legal education have centered on issues of comparison, quality controls, relevance and so on. These often end in a lament about the failure in producing good lawyers. So much so, these debates had the lawyering skills in focus. These elaborated the quality time in the premier law school training spent on core content, interdisciplinary aspects, advocacy, professional and placement training. In spite of two decades of national law schools’ existence, certain questions loom large. Did such new strides in legal education make any difference in addressing the unmet legal needs of the community? Did the products of new generation of law schools representing the new approach to legal education, create any stir in the democratic and socio-economic landscape of the country? Besides responding to the huge unmet legal needs of the powerful players in a booming economy, what else have they contributed? Despite having the potential and characteristics of great learning centers, why are the leading law schools criticized as the reductive machinery churning out personnel for the monolithic corporate setup? Although these criticisms are too preposterous and should be more fair by giving some more time to such law schools to achieve their avowed objectives of making a quality difference to the bench and the bar, one question still hovers. How far did these law schools fulfill a leadership role in cascading the quality or capacity building in the community or to other less privileged neighborhood law schools and colleagues?