Teaching Professional Skills and Values in India: Challenges and Roadmap for Future

Abstract

Educating law students in fundamental professional skills and values has become an integral part of the modern legal education curriculum. ‘Clinical legal education’ (CLE) is the instructional method used for teaching professional skills and values. CLE aims to impart training of professional skills and values by engaging the students with legal aid activities and using that experience for the teaching–learning process. In the United States, credited for developing CLE, law faculties involve students to represent cases of indigent clients under their supervision and use that experience to teach legal skills and professional values. But with the global expansion of CLE, along with the US model (client representation clinic), many innovative alternative models have evolved, primarily due to local diversities. Therefore, in jurisdictions where ‘client representation clinic’ is not suitable due to local restrictions and resource constraints, new models such as ‘Street Law Clinic’, ‘Externship Clinic’ or ‘Law Reform Clinic’ have successfully evolved to be CLE model. Although regulatory bodies of Indian legal education have made CLE a mandatory part of the curriculum for over two decades, its implementation has been negligible and ineffective. Lack of proper training of faculties, absence of guidelines on CLE practice and procedure, financial constraints and legal restriction on faculties and their students to represent in courts are some of the reasons highlighted for the same. This article argues that legal education is inadequate and increases the gap with the legal profession, if professional skills and values are not imparted in a proper manner. In order to overcome the current inadequacy, effective integration of CLE is the call of the day. The article explores two alternative clinical teaching models namely ‘Street Law Clinic’ and ‘Law Reform Clinic’ and provides means to overcome the existing bottlenecks in implementation of CLE. It narrates the experiences of functioning of these clinics at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS) and apprises how these models can be replicated for effective clinical teaching, suiting Indian conditions.