Legal Education and Its Outcomes: Digging Deeper into the Successes and Failures of India's National Law Schools

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Law is often claimed to be the world’s oldest ‘profession’, and due to this legacy, legal education systems have always grappled with the dichotomy between professional and liberal training. In India, this debate has been particularly under the limelight in the last twenty-five years, since the inception of the National Law School experiment – a model that was meant to impart socially relevant education and produce social engineers. Keeping in mind the worldwide expansion of the legal profession and its interaction with neo-liberal forces, this project seeks to investigate the successes and failures of this model, based on the perceptions of key stakeholder groups, namely faculty, employers and students. It first explored the discourse on the establishment of the first National Law School, in order to understand the rationale for this move and the vision that it embodied. This provided the foundation for the primary part of the project – a qualitative analysis of the performance of this model on various parameters, as perceived by students, faculty and employers, at NLSIU and NALSAR. These two schools were chosen for their reputation, but more importantly, for their ability to provide evidence spanning at least a decade of existence. Finally, the data was linked with the findings from the discourse to understand how success is perceived in this context, by graduates as well as by the institutions. The results corroborated previous literature in greater detail, but also revealed some further information. They confirmed, first, that the National Law Schools were meant to be professional schools, producing professional lawyers – the liberal part of the education was important, but still secondary. In fact, there appeared to be a strong emphasis on the specific outcomes that graduates of these schools were meant to pursue – the Bar and the bench. But despite the strength of their mission, it was found that these schools could not resist the forces of liberalisation and globalisation. Secondly, stakeholders unanimously felt that these schools are suffering from several issues which need to be addressed. Poor quality of faculty and curriculum, and lack of adequate practical training were identified as the biggest of these. It was also found that many of these factors have together increased the corporatisation of outcomes at these schools. Finally, while the legal profession has expanded significantly, it appeared that the institutional vision of the National Law Schools has stagnated, resulting in a mismatch between expectation and reality. Fortunately, simple solutions to address many of these problems did emerge. However, many of these are only likely to provide short-term relief and all stakeholders expressed a dire need for rethinking in the long term.