Like any system of education, the purpose of legal education is to inculcate value system in the students, in addition to imparting knowledge and skills. If we define the purpose of legal education is to create good lawyers, the question who is a good lawyer would come immediately: Is a good lawyer one who is a good orator, or one who is skilled in legal drafting, or one who has a strong foundation in legal reasoning? A good lawyer is like the “good” neighbour as propounded by Jesus Christ- one who is good for you in bad times; one who is inwardly ethical, helping and caring, regardless of the image the world has for such person.
Cicero more or less defined a “good lawyer” when he said that Sulpicius was not less a master of law than of justice (non minus juris consultus quam justitiae). This shows that even from very early days, a true breed of lawyer was seen as one who is striving always to be in command of all the learning of the law, but striving no less earnestly to make the law fit the equality of justice and the ethical demand of righteousness. See John Maxcy Zane, The Story of the Law [1927].
The foundations of creating a good lawyer should start from the law school. The Carnegie Report pointed to the needs of ethical foundations in legal education.
It is the “moral discernment” that Carnegie Report attaches to knowledge and skill that makes a lawyer a “good” lawyer.
Focusing to Indian scenario, Indian law schools have not yet thought of undergoing the transformation that the Carnegie report focuses. Right from the time of Indian independence(1947), there has not been much appreciation about the way how law colleges in India were functioning. Dr S Radhakrishnan, the eminent educationist and first Vice President of India, and two times President of India, lamented : “Our Colleges of law do not hold a place of high esteem either at home or abroad, nor has law become an arena of profound scholarship and enlightened research”. Indian Courts have also been focusing attention on the quality of legal education of and on.
The Hon’ble Supreme Court of India in State of Maharashtra vs Manubhai Pragaji Vashi & Ors (AIR 1996 SC 1:1995 SCC (5) 730)(see here) had held:
"The need for a continuing and well organised legal education is absolutely essential reckoning the new trends in the world order, to meet the ever growing challenges. The legal education should be able to meet the ever growing demands of the society and thoroughly equipped to cater to the complexities of the different situations. Specialisation in different branches of law is necessary. The requirement is of such a great dimension, that sizeable or vast number of dedicated persons should be properly trained in different branches of law, every year by providing or rendering competent and proper legal education. This is possible only if adequate number of law colleges with proper infrastructure including expertise law teachers and staff are established to deal with situation in an appropriate manner. It cannot admit of doubt that, of late there is a fall in the standard of legal education. The area of 'deficiency' should be located and correctives should be effected with the co-operation of competent persons before the matter gets beyond control. Needless to say that reputed and competent academics should be taken into confidence and their services availed of, to set right matters."
In a much graver vein, a division bench of the Bombay High Court in Inamdar Vahab vs. Symbosis Society's Law College, Pune (AIR 1984 BOMBAY 451)(here) lamented on the quality of entrants into the legal education:
“No profession can maintain high standard if it is allowed to be inundated by persons who reluctantly took up the law course because having failed to secure admission to the courses of their choice, they have nothing else to do.”
Very recently, in K.Sakthi Rani vs The Secretary (2010) (here) Hon’ble High Court of Madras held:
“A good legal education is a sine quo non for creating a good lawyer. Such a legal education is the basis and foundation for creating a good and competent Judge as well.” It also observed that “Legal Education is essentially a multi-disciplined, multi-purpose education which can develop the human resources and idealism needed to strengthen the legal system.... A lawyer, a product of such education would be able to contribute to national development and social change in a much more constructive manner.”
In the recent history of legal education in India, National law schools, and the sole Global Law School have to a large extent filled the gap that existed in the curricular input, and were to an extent able to churn out “practice ready” law students, who are both skilled and knowledgeable. There are critics who argue that such law schools just generated a genre of “corporate ready lawyers”, since many of the students who pass out of these elite law schools were absorbed by corporate, and were are not ready to join law practice. While this criticism as such is not an indicator that these law schools do not provide a firm moral foundation to the students, and many students from these institutions move to litigation and other socially relevant practice, economic barrier caused by the high fees in these institutions are to a certain extent responsible to the lack of social responsibility and non interest of the students of these institutions to traditional legal practice areas. However it also remains a sad fact that out of the 900 odd law schools in India, we are speaking about hardly 30 law schools, who can make students at least “corporate ready” while the vast majority of other law schools have been happy in claiming that due to the low fees they are charging(and not because of the quality of legal education they are imparting!) they are creating “socially relevant lawyers”.
The term “socially relevant lawyers” is sadly misinterpreted as “lawyers who are willing to practice in lower courts and take up litigation work”, without reference to any quality that is put forward by such persons. The saddest fact is that many of these lawyers turn to litigation not by choice, but by lack of any alternate choice!. Hence it is high time that we start redefining the term “socially relevant lawyer”, so as to make the term more relevant and contextual. If you substitute the term “good lawyer” as defined in the first part of this article for the term “socially relevant lawyer” the term becomes more contextual. A socially relevant lawyer would then be defined as one who is inwardly ethical, helping and caring, and who is no less a master of law knowing how to law fit the equality of justice and the ethical demand of righteousness into his practice of law.
Now what should law schools do to create such “good lawyers”?
One should realize that moral discernment is more an ethical trait which should be imbibed in the mind of a person through experience rather than through class room learning. Effectively functioning law school legal aid clinics, which regularly take up the social issues and fight for it, is the best method to inculcate this ethical trait in the mind of law students. However the existing legal aid clinics in most law schools just serve an academic purpose, by providing lectures, and seminars and some legal literacy classes to certain sections of the society. Social consciousness does not come by lectures; they come by working along with the suffering people in the society, and by understanding the needs of the socially, politically, economically and educationally disadvantageous sections of the society. The lectures just give a pedantic view about the legal issues, devoid of the moral, cultural and ethical space in which these legal issues stand. Even while in law schools, the students should learn to make the law fit the equality of justice and the ethical demand of righteousness, by immersing themselves in social value system that surround the legal issues. Then only the students would be able to understand that a good legal solution has to be right according to law, and at the same time be just and moral. A solution which is legally correct but ethically wrong cannot be called a good legal solution and a person who provides such solution cannot be called a good lawyer. It would be unwise to think that a lawyer becomes morally upright just by remaining low paid or without remuneration. Moral uprightness and being unpaid do not always go together, because one still be unethical if he does not charge a fee! As Deborah Rhode puts in her article “Expanding the Role of Ethics in Legal Education and the Legal Profession”, what we need is a better recognition of diversity among legal practitioners, and their cultural and ethical back grounds, greater attention to quality of life issues, making lawyers ready to accept personal moral responsibility for the consequences of their professional conduct, making lawyers weigh the values at issue, and ensuring equitable access to legal services to all, and greater public accountability for professional regulation.
In order to inculcate such a spirit in the law students, law schools should focus on creating an ethical outlook towards the legal systems, make them understand the needs of the society they are supposed to work in, ensure a better quality of life to lawyers, so that they can focus on social issues, without getting too much concerned about personal financial and family security, inculcating the importance of legal inclusion and equitable access to legal services to all, even while they are in law schools. The teaching at law school should also focus on accepting moral responsibility for their personal and professional conduct and to weigh values at issue, so that by the time the profession makes them publically accountably they have the moral strength to own up the responsibility of professional regulation.