Clinical Legal Education Jha

An assignment of Clinical education
Topic:-History of Clinical Education: An Indian and International perspective

Under the guidance of Dr. Eqbal Hussain
Ayush Jha, BALLB (H.), Roll no. 09BALLB 10, 7th Semester, 4th year
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective
PREFACE
The legal education is the basis of an efficient legal profession which is the basis of a well-organized and sound judicial system .Unfortunately the legal education was not paid due attention during the British period and even after independence it has been the most neglected branch of the education. It is a matter of pleasure that the Bar Council of India has taken the legal education very seriously and has made commendable efforts for its improvement .One of the pitfalls of the legal education is that it has put less emphasis on the practical training of the subject. This assignment makes an effort to make the readers aware of the historical development of the system if clinical legal education in India and its very importance. The material has been collected from various sources. This assignment contains material on the Historical Approach towards Clinical Legal Education and its development in India and abroad. I hope it serves as a good and helpful read to all the readers.
METHODOLOGY
This assignment has been prepared on the doctrinal type of methodology. The material has been collected from various sources that of articles, books various law journals, newspapers and internet. It contains viewpoint of many jurists and advocates. The material was collected and arranged in order. This assignment emphasizes on the Historical Approach towards Clinical Legal Education in India. In order to make it easily understandable, In the last section, a conclusion is given that concludes the topic and gives a quick gist of the whole subject.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I extend my heartfelt gratitude and sincere thanks to my clinical law teacher Dr. Eqbal Hussain for his encouragement and full cooperation throughout the completion of this assignment. Without his guidance and support this assignment would never have been possible.
THANK YOU SIR
SYNOPSIS
Introduction Defining Clinical Legal Education Why clinical legal education in India? Clinical Legal Education in India and the United States: A Comparative Overview Benefits of clinical education What is a Legal Clinic Types of Legal Clinics History of Clinical Legal Education Development of Clinical legal Education In India Global Development Of Clinical Legal Education Legal Education Reform and Law School-based Legal Aid Clinics in India: Laying the groundwork for Social Justice based Clinical Legal Education Efforts to link legal aid and legal education reform Reviewing Clinical Legal Education Clinical Legal education and practical training papers Conclusion
INTRODUCTION
As we enter the new millennium, the movement beyond the casebook method to the wider integration of clinical methodology throughout the curriculum stands on a solid intellectual foundation. Yet, although clinical legal education is a permanent feature in legal education, too often clinical teaching and clinical programs remain at the periphery of law school curricula. Doctrine, theory, and skills cannot be appreciated if they are introduced without engaging the pathos of the human issues that the lawyer encounters when representing clients. So little attempt has been made to reflect this relationship that the goals of the legal academy have been called into question. Professor Richard Neumann puts it this way: Because it does not expect itself to produce practitioners, legal education is in some ways closer to graduate liberal arts education than it is to professional education as other professions define it. . . . It would be unthinkable to graduate physicians with no clinical clerkships or architects with no experience in a design studio.1 The term, "clinical legal education" was first used by Jerome Frank, in 1933 in United States in his article, "Why not a Clinical Lawyer School"2 and has since then been the focus of attention for improvement of legal education and for creating a synthesis between the law schools and the legal profession. The legal clinic concept was first discussed at the turn of the twentieth century by two professors as a variant of the medical clinic model. Russian professor Alexander I. Lyublinsky in 1901, quoting an article in a German journal, and American professor William Rowe, in a 1917 article, each wrote about the concept of a legal clinic. Both professors associated it with the medical professions tradition of requiring medical students to train in functioning clinics ministering to real patients under the supervision of experienced physicians.
Clinical legal education is essential to preparing law students to practice law effectively. Clinics are important because they prepare students to practice law by teaching them valuable skills such as fact-finding, investigation, interviewing, and legal research and writing. In the
1
Richard K. Neumann, Jr., Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner, and the Comparative Failures of Legal Education, 6 Clin. L. Rev. 401, 404 (2000). 2 81 UPA. L. Rev. 907 (1933)
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective United States, law students learn these skills by undertaking projects or cases on behalf of individuals, always under faculty supervision and guidance. Students also develop a sense of social justice and empathy through their work with disenfranchised groups.Clinical Legal Education (CLE) has been a significant part of legal education since 1960. The first clinic started in U. K. in 1970 and in Australia in 1990s. The concept is fast expanding across the globe also. The clinical method allows students to confront the uncertainties and challenges of problem solving for clients in fora that often challenge precepts regarding the rule of law and justice. To say that the process of learning law in such a textured manner should be relegated to a certain course or set of courses ignores what educational theorists have been saying for years: that the best learning takes place when the broad range of abilities we possess is engaged. According to Professor Barbara Woodhouse, "perhaps one of the most serious failings in contemporary legal education is that all too many students graduate with a vast doctrinal base of knowledge sealed within a context that is not translatable into practice."3
The Clinical Legal Education is necessary to bridge a gap between theory and practice. The aim of this article is to know the various types of Clinical legal Education, its necessity in curriculum and current initiatives and practices in Indian Clinical Legal Education.
DEFINING CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION The Clinical Legal Education can be defined in various ways Clinical Legal Education is essentially a multi-disciplined, multipurpose 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.4
John B. Mitchell, Betsy R. Hollingsworth, Patricia Clark & Raven Lidman, And Then Suddenly Seattle University Was on its Way to a Parallel, Integrative Curriculum, 2 Clin. L. Rev. 1, 21 (1995). 4 KuljitKaur ,Legal Education and Social Transformation [available at: http://alsonline.amity.edu/Docs/alwjlegkk.pdf] [viewed on: 25/06/2009]
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective A learning environment where students identify, research and apply knowledge in a setting which replicates, at least in part, the world where it is practiced. It almost inevitably means that the student takes on some aspect of a case and conducts this as it would be conducted in the real world.5 a learning environment where students identify, research and apply knowledge in a setting which replicates, at least in part, the world where it is practised.... It almost inevitably means that the student takes on some aspect of a case and conducts this as it would ... be conducted in the real world.6 Prof. Sathe asked the pertinent question, "Is legal education all about imparting skills of lawyering or does it also have to create a commitment to certain values?"7 He opined : A lawyer is not only a seller of services but he is a professional who renders services for maintaining the rule of law. He is supposed to be an officer of the court. He has to have commitment to certain values such as democracy, individual liberty, social and economic equality including gender equality and concern for the disadvantaged sections of society which will include the poor, women, the physically handicapped, children, the minorities and the dalits. Legal education has to create such a commitment.
The Clinical Legal Education is a term which encompasses learning which is focused on enabling students to understand how the law works in action. This can be done by undertaking real or realistic simulated case work. In early days law is thought as one of the curriculum available to the students. Even though the casebook method was growing in earlier days, there were critics of this method from the beginning. However the first-hand experience method will really educate the law students. The legal education clinics if
Richard Lewis, Clinical Legal Education Revisited Professor of Law, Cardiff University, Wales, United
Kingdom, Pg. 5 , [available at: http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/research/pubs/repository/21] [viewed on: 25/06/2009]

6
R. Grimes, The Theory And Practice Of Clinical Legal Education in J. Webb and C. Maugham (eds.) Teaching Lawyers Skills (1996) at p 138. 7 S.P. Sathe- Keynote Address in roundtable discussion on community responsive legal education: trends in South Asia, November 27-28, 2001, organised by the United States Educational Foundation in India in collaboration with Pune Law College
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective properly channeled may help the students to gain their knowledge. The use of the word clinic prompts the analogy of trainee doctors meeting real patients in their medical clinics. Clinical Legal Education is only one way in which theory and practice can be brought together. Now every nation is giving importance on the clinical legal education in order to groom their future lawyers, the law makers, the executors, law officers, judges and law teachers to acquire knowledge through a scientific method keeping pace with the ethics and philosophy of the society. The objective of the clinical education is radical, reformative and dynamic. The following are the basic features of the clinical legal education The students are to experience the impact of law on the life of the people. The students are to be exposed to the actual milieu in which dispute arise and to enable them to develop a sense of social responsibility in professional work. The students are to be acquainted with the lawyering process in general and the skills of advocacy in particular. (iv)The students are to critically consume knowledge from outside the traditional legal arena for better delivery of legal services. The students are to develop research aptitude, analytical pursuits and communicating skills. They are to understand the limit and limitations of the formal legal system and to appreciate the relevance and the use of alternate modes of lawyering. They are to imbibe social and humanistic values in relation to law and legal process while following the norms of professional ethics A legal clinic (also law clinic or law school clinic) is a law school program providing handson-legal experience to law school students and services to various clients. Clinics are usually directed by clinical professors.8 Legal clinics typically do pro bono work in a particular area, providing free legal services to clients. Students typically provide assistance with research, drafting legal arguments, and meeting with clients. In many cases, one of the clinic's professors will show up for oral argument
Black's Law Dictionary, 6th Edition, "clinical legal studies," (St. Paul, Minn: West Publishing Co., 1990), 254
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective before the Court. However, many jurisdictions have "student practice" rules that allow lawclinic students to appear and argue in court.910 Clinical legal education may be simply described as learning through application, practice and reflection. It is quite different from the traditional legal education. The lecture- seminar method so common in the education of the law students does not meet the clinical demands, however they are vital as they render vital information being predominantly content and assessment led. Clinical legal education is directed towards developing the perceptions, attitudes, skills and sense of responsibilities which the lawyers are expected to assume when they complete their professional education. It can, therefore, be as broad and varied as the law school curriculum would accommodate; certainly it is not limited to the mere training in certain skills of advocacy. Clinical legal education has wider goals of enabling law students to understand and assimilate responsibilities as a member of a public service in the administration of law, in the reform of the law, in the equitable distribution of the legal services in society, in the protection of individual rights and public. Clinical teaching methods Although clinical legal education learning methods are traditionally used to teach such lawyering skills as interviewing and counseling, legal writing and drafting, fact finding, case analysis, trial preparation and trial advocacy, they can also be used to teach substantive and procedural law courses.
Depending on the nature of the law school's academic programme it may not always be possible to replace lectures entirely with clinical teaching methods. However, where there is scope for small group work, such as tutorials or practical sessions, it is possible to introduce a wide variety of interactive clinical legal education teaching methods in order to illuminate the substantive and procedural law curriculum for law students. Some of the more common interactive learning methods include the following:
9 10
role plays
Louisiana Supreme Court Rule XXhttp://www.lasc.org/rules/supreme/RuleXX.asp Uniform Local Rules Of The United States District Courts For The Eastern, Middle, And Western Districts Of Louisiana, LR83.2.13, http://www.laed.uscourts.gov/LocalRules/Civil_83.htm
10
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective simulations moots mock trials case studies small group discussions debates 'taking a stand' 'thinking on your feet' the PRES formula games triads 'fishbowls'11
This concept of justice education that is clinical education in the field of legal education means that the law school curriculum should entail certain programs like Lok Adalats, Legal Aid & Legal Literacy and para-legal training. The complementary teaching methodology of learning by doing and the conventional classroom teaching, through the law school clinics, help in developing the advocacy skills in the law students. 'Mock' trials and Moot court competitions, structured as court trial; client interviewing and counseling sessions; legal research; editing of law journals; legal drafting and conveyancing; court visits etc. in the curriculum is one of the ideal ways to facilitate performance based education. It is a means of improving in students the basic skills such as the skills of critical thinking, presentation skills, participation skills, the skills to work as a team, the leadership quality, in addition to the boost in students knowledge of law
11
DOMINICK R. VETRI , EDUCATING THE LAWYER: CLINICAL EXPERIENCE AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF LEGAL EDUCATION
11
Why Clinical Legal Education in India?

Clinics expose students to the impact that the practice of law has on people. No one should pretend that they are prepared to practice without a sense of this impact and a constructive way to think about it. This perspective has significant implications for the way legal education is approached in India. It is law schools that must foster a contextual understanding of what lawyers should do to meet the needs of the country. This means connecting students with communities and involving them in creative solutions that focus on the common good. The new model for law schools the law university grew out of a perceived need to enhance the quality of legal education in India. The universities represent a bold move to reinvent legal education practices. The practices that were found lacking in law schools were overcrowded classrooms, lack of rigor in teaching, lack of attention to socio-economic problems, and a general lack of preparation for professional practice. As with other law schools in India, students come to the national law universities straight out of 10+2. Arguably, these students are too young and their education too narrow to take full advantage of professional training. In the United States, law is a post-graduate study; university graduates enter law schools to obtain a doctorate in law. However, many other countries follow a pattern similar to Indias, for economic if no other reasons.12 The expense of attending college prior to preparing for professional practice can be prohibitive, particularly when undergraduate study is imposed as a condition precedent. The universities offer a fiveyear program, the first two years of which include social science and economics courses along with law courses. Economics and an expansive view of access to education have led to overcrowding in the professional institutions. The number of students attending law schools in India does not necessarily represent vocation or an expectation of entering the profession; students also enter law school as a matter of opportunity or indecision. The national law universities narrowed this pool by raising admissions standards and charging students to attend, setting aside scholarships to assure access to some of the qualified students who could not otherwise matriculate. Reflecting some attention to the Bar Councils Practical Paper requirements, students are required at NALSAR Law University to spend time in practice settings in four of their five years. The placements have the potential to allow students to interact with the legal
12
See, e.g., Frans J. Vanistendael, Quality Control of Students and Barriers to Access in West-European Legal Education, 43 S. Tex. L. Rev. 691, 692 (2002)
12
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective community and experience the law in context. However, the placements are apparently student-run projects rather than the product of faculty supervision and educational rigor. Students organize the placements, interact with the relevant offices and appear for work. The school is not involved in this exchange in any meaningful way other than to register the fact that each placement occurred. Beyond these placements, experiential learning is limited at NALSAR to moot court and a few classroom simulations. How did clinical legal education remain largely undeveloped in this new institution given the goals that supported development of the law universities? In part, the necessary emphasis placed on building physical facilities and attracting highly qualified faculties and students provides insight. Establishing new institutions in which traditional teachers organize the curriculum and teach the courses is not a prescription for significant curricular change, even though the framework of fewer students and greater resources suggest some opportunity for improvement. Lack of experience in clinical teaching, the demand on teaching resources that clinics make and the Bar Councils failure to provide institutional support for the clinical legal education espoused contribute to the difficulty realizing desired change. Indeed, the Bar Council sends the message that law teachers are to be disengaged from the practice of law by denying the license to practice it. Thus, the substantive curricular changes articulated by Dr. Menon and urged in the many reports appear to be eluding the new institutions, though, paradoxically, there is some evidence of progress towards the articulated goals in other law schools. V. M. Salgaocar College of Law Legal Aid Society, which began in 1998, is an example of what can be achieved in India, and is an example of Indias potential as a leader the international clinical legal education movement. It operates thirty-five permanent free legal aid cells throughout the state of Goa. Each cell consists of a team of two students. The cells are set up and housed in government buildings, schools, and church or temple premises. Students carry out awareness campaigns, provide legal advice and pursue remedies such as meeting with the other party, meeting with government officials and providing legal referral services. The students also perform paralegal aid services, such as visiting jails, registering marriages, births, and deaths, obtaining ration cards, and preparing affidavits. They also prepare and file documents that are required for obtaining benefits under various welfare schemes. Students also work with faculty members to petition relevant authorities who are obliged under law to remedy the injustice. If relief is not provided, the students work with lawyers to file a petition before the High Court. Students can argue these cases under special rules that allow any member of the 13
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective public to present such cases Since interest in clinical legal education in India was nourished by developments in the United States, to what extent is what has been happening in the United States instructive? Legal Education Reform in the United States Legal education in the United States has been repeatedly criticized for its failure to adequately prepare students for the practice of law. The critique has come in the form of high-level reports, judicial commentary13 and numerous law review articles that call for more relevant training. When Professor Langdell championed the casebook method and the use of Socratic dialogue in the early 1900s, his goal was to establish legal education as an academic discipline. That concern still casts a shadow that arguably dissociates legal education from significant aspects of its obligation to develop professional competency. This is not to say that Langdells method, particularly as it has evolved to include problem solving and critical studies, is not important or relevant. It is recognize that more is needed. The concern that too much is asked of law schools if they are expected to expose students to the law both in theory and practice must not be the end of the analysis. Theory and practice are intertwined in law, as they should be in any profession. This connection is not fully acknowledged by law schools, and the educational programs have suffered as a result. The Carnegie Foundation report, EDUCATING LAWYERS: PREPARATION FOR THE PROFESSION OF LAW (2007), underscores the need for change in the approach to legal education. The report cites the newly published BEST PRACTICES FOR LEGAL EDUCATION: A VISION AND A ROADMAP, a project of the Clinical Legal Education Association that takes an in depth look at all aspects of legal education in the United States and recommends methods for improvement. Both books discuss the importance of clinical programs and the use of clinical methodology across the curriculum to achieve the necessary integration of substantive law and professional skills and values. All accredited law school in the United States have clinical programs. Given the growth of clinical programs in law schools in the United States, one might wonder why the statements continue to be made that link their importance to needed improvement. A fundamental problem with the approach to
13
See Warren E. Burger, The Special Skills of Advocacy: Are Specialized Training and Certification of Advocates Essential to Our System of Justice?, 42 Fordham L. Rev. 227 (1973); Harry T. Edwards, The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession, 91 Mich. L. Rev. 34 (1992)
14
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective clinical programs, and this is also true of skills courses in most U.S. law schools, is that they are viewed as nonessential and/or unrelated to the substantive law courses offered. The hard work of integrating experiential education into the curricula has not happened in this profession, raising serious concerns about the quality of professional preparation. What do clinical courses offer that these analyses and critiques of legal education find so important? First of all, the emphasis on clinical programs addressing skills and values that substantive law classes do not reach may suggest that clinical programs fully prepare students to enter the profession as competent practitioners. No such argument is intended. Clinical programs do well if they introduce students to the competencies they will need, strategies for building expertise and critical assessment of the lawyers role. While the traditional American classroom uses casebooks and the Socratic method to expose students to a body of substantive material and develop their ability to analyze the material,14 the range of competencies that a clinical course seeks to develop is broader. They include interviewing, fact investigation, an extensive application of problem solving skills, attorney-client relations, negotiation and other alternative dispute resolution methods, ethical considerations, pre-trial and trial skills. They are taught using methods that include role-playing, simulations, brainstorming, highly interactive discussions, regular in-depth feedback, and direct client representation. Significantly, they instruct by helping students to build on their experiences. Second, clinical courses expose students to opportunities to use legal expertise to address issues of social concern, particularly the needs of the poor. Regardless of whether students intend to work in public interest law, they need to be aware of their obligations to contribute to their communities and of the special role they are becoming equipped to play in addressing a range of social problems. While the classroom can raise theoretical issues about social justice, access to legal interventions and reform, understanding the problems in terms of access, application, and sufficiency comes from well-supervised work with poor people. Thus, these issues are best raised through direct service to disadvantaged clients, either through representation or some other opportunity to work closely with them in order to understand the problems and the attorneys special ability to provide effective assistance. Clinical programs in law schools across the United States have addressed one or both of these goals through experiences that are discussed below. The discussion considers these
14
See e.g. Robert J. Rhee, The Socratic Method and the Mathematical Heuristic of George Polya, 81 St. John's L. Rev. 881 (2007)
15
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective approaches in relation to what might make sense for the law universities, not as a prescription for what should be the ultimate or ideal approach but rather as a way to begin to think about moving along the path to implementing some of the reforms that have been advocated for so long. Clinical Legal Education in India and the United States: A Comparative Overview Clinical legal education involves teaching students to be lawyers by learning through experience or learning by doing. In the United States, clinics are typically organized as law school classes where students, under faculty supervision, represent clients in a variety of litigation and non-litigation matters. In addition to learning lawyering skills, clinical education furthers social justice by providing legal representation to poor people and by sensitizing law students to the concerns of marginalized groups in society. As such, law school clinics have the potential to play an important role in making access to justice a reality for many low-income people. Clinical programs in American law schools burgeoned in the 1960s alongside the civil rights movement and the national focus on eliminating poverty. Most clinics at the time engaged students in providing routine legal services to local community members who could not otherwise afford them. Today most law schools in the United States offer clinics as part of their curricular offerings, in many different subject areas of law. In India, there have been waves of national-level reform efforts concentrating on the development of a skills-based curriculum.4 The Bar Council of India issued a directive in 1997 that requires law schools to include certain classes focused on practical training.5 Even where schools have introduced these classes, however, it is common for more than eighty students to be enrolled in one class. This makes it virtually impossible for instructors to provide supervision to students in undertaking legal work. In a 2002 report, the Law Commission of India suggested that clinical legal education be mandatory.6 Today there are a number of legal aid cells in Indian law schools where students, largely without faculty guidance or supervision, provide direct legal services to individuals.7 Despite these national calls for reform, most law schools in India lack robust clinical education programs where faculty directly supervise students in experiential learning. A recent UNDP report surveying 39 law schools with legal aid cells found that although 82% of those schools had faculty designated to supervise legal aid cells, 63% of those schools gave no academic credit to 16
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective students.8 Where law schools do undertake legal aid activities, most involve legal literacy camps.9 According to this UNDP study, the key problems in developing clinical legal education in India are that: (1) no credit is given to students who undertake these activities, which is a disincentive to students to conduct them and discourages them to follow through on their commitments; (2) there is no workload reduction given to faculty who are designated to supervise legal aid cells; (3) communities are not aware that the law schools provide free legal services; and (4) under the Advocates Act, full-time law teachers and students are not allowed to represent clients before courts.10 Following the summary of these and additional challenges to developing law school clinics in India found by this UNDP study15:
Lack of trained faculty Lack of financial support Restriction on faculty to practice in court of law Restriction on students to represent clients in court Lack of involvement of the Indian Bar Lack of involvement of the Judiciary Lack of specific directions from Bar Council of India No academic credit to students for legal aid work Legal aid not counted as faculty workload Lack of infrastructural facilities
15
United Nations Development Programme India, A Study of Law School Based Legal Service Clinics 2 (2011), available at http://www.in.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/a_study_of_law_school_based_legal_services _clinics.pdf (covering seven major states: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh)
17
BENEFITS OF CLINICAL EDUCATION

There are many benefits which have been claimed to follow from clinical legal education programmes. Only the main ones can be summarised here:(a) Learning by experience The main advantage of clinical education is that, compared to traditional teaching methods, it involves a different approach to the learning of law: it encompasses experiential learning, or learning by doing. Instead of learning by means of traditional lectures where students are often expected to be sponges reactively soaking up information students are much more proactive participants in the learning process. It is their initiative which determines the scope of the clients problem; and they plan and work for its solution. Such students are much more likely to learn if they recognise that their success is determined by their own efforts rather than external factors e.g. how good is the lecturer is, or what questions have previously been asked on the exam paper. In addition, if there is a clear purpose to what is being learned it is more likely to have an effect. It is not so much what has been learned, but what can be done with what has been learned. That is, it is applying the knowledge that is the key, not the learning of it. Clinical education clearly gives opportunities for the knowledge to be applied, but it also goes beyond this and calls for reflection and self examination. It gives students the opportunity to explain why they are taking certain actions and they are able to discuss and reconsider their actions. Legal practitioners themselves rarely have the time or opportunity to do this. Students, by contrast, can examine the legal and social issues in some depth, and they can form the basis for looking at the lawyers role and at legal ethics within a practical context. The result is that what is learned is far more likely to remain with the student than the knowledge crammed for an extremely artificial examination paper. The contrast between experiential learning and the traditional information transmission model of legal education can be stark. Treating students as merely empty vessels into which legal information can be poured apparently without end - provides them with only a small part of what they need in order to understand the nature and processes of law, and to operate effectively as a practitioner. As a result the teaching of legal skills is now widely recognised 18
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective as a legitimate, even critical part of an effective legal education. We now have a great deal of knowledge about how students learn. There is a considerable literature on educational theory. It is important for law schools to understand and make effective use of this information when considering how they achieve the educational goals that either are set for them or they set for themselves. All too often in the past law schools have operated as if they alone knew best how to teach and how students learn. That position can no longer be maintained. Reformers of legal education, whether in Japan or elsewhere, must look to the wider developments which have taken place in education generally if they are to set up an effective and modern system for instructing students.
(b) Acquisition of skills Experiential learning means moving away from an information-based syllabus caricatured by rote or memory-based learning accompanied by condensed summary examinations. Instead clinical education embraces a skills-based approach. This means paying as much attention to the processes associated with legal practice e.g. the structure a letter, the interview with the client, face to face negotiation as to the legal content of the rules forming the background to the work done. Their importance is specifically examined in the UK government report on legal education. The skills include: Research skill especially where the relevant area of law is completely new. Communication skills e.g. advocacy before differing tribunals or bodies. Interviewing e.g. clients and witnesses. The law students traditional indoctrination into a cross examiners style is revealed in clinical practice as inadequate and often leading to obscuring the facts rather than discovering them. Instead students must learn to relate to clients and e.g. develop active listening skills in order to obtain the full facts. Counselling e.g. helping sometimes bewildered clients to understand and deal with events.
19
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective Drafting with the supervision of Law teachers and professionals, the students are able to understand the procedure of drafting various instruments required in court. Negotiating the art of settlement for something instead of litigating for all reflects much more the realities of legal practice and the use made of the law than does study of formal accounts of those untypical disputes which are adjudicated by a court. Problem solving seeing the full context of a clients problem and bringing together what otherwise might be seen as distinct areas of legal study - e.g. contract, debt, housing and land law, together with social security and civil procedure commonly arise together in a landlord-tenant dispute. Interpersonal and organisational skills including e.g. communicating and working as a member of a team, helping to organise and maintain office procedures. (c) Student motivation and development Students who work in a legal clinic are enthusiastic about their experience. They are selfmotivated and often highly committed to the work. They are more responsible for what they do and how they do it. In theory, the teachers role becomes more facilitative - helping students discover solutions for themselves. My own disenchantment with law school when a student is a feeling still shared by all too many students. To an extent involvement in clinical work can help reduce such feelings, and can invigorate future study. It can cause students to think again about what law school offers and what direction their future career could take. Clinical experience puts colour in the empty outlines of the legal comic book. Questions which were dull and meaningless become important and exciting. Answers which seemed black and white become grey, red and green. Dull legal rules become memorable elements of unforgettable events.
(d) Professional ethics and responsibility The study of ethics and the professional responsibility and conduct of lawyers has been markedly absent from law schools in contrast to medical schools. However, there has been a growth of interest in this area in recent years, and it is a subject which arguably is better dealt with in a clinical context where the often abstract notions can be given a practical context.
20
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective Whether educators can actually affect the development of students moral consciousness is much open to debate. But at least the crucible of the clinic allows moral issues to be debated more openly than within the confines of the traditional curriculum. (e) Involvement with the local community The image of the university as an ivory tower is often all too real in that it can be very divorced from the environment in which it operates. Not only its students but also its staff can be cut off from the local community. A law clinic can help reduce this isolation by making the law school more relevant to that community. It can, for example, offer advice and assistance to local people who might not otherwise obtain any help at all. The benefits of this can operate in more than one direction. Most obviously, the most disadvantaged members of society may gain some means of redress. But in addition the young student may be faced with the problems of those from a different generation and background. This experience can add to their understanding of the position of others in society, and can increase their maturity and sense of responsibility. They have to deal with problems without becoming so emotionally involved with clients as to have their judgement clouded.
WHAT IS A LEGAL CLINIC ? A legal clinic (also law clinic or law school clinic) is a law school program providing hands-on-legal experience to law school students and services to various clients.16 Clinics are usually directed by clinical professors. Legal clinics typically do pro bono work in a particular area, providing free legal services to clients. Students typically provide assistance with research, drafting legal arguments, and meeting with clients. In many cases, one of the clinic's professors will show up for oral argument before the Court. However, many jurisdictions have "student practice" rules that allow law-clinic students to appear and argue in court.
16
Black's Law Dictionary, 6th Edition, " clinical legal studies," (St. Paul, Minn: West Publishing Co.,1990), 254
21
.Clinical legal studies exist in diverse areas such as immigration law, environmental law, intellectual property, housing, criminal defense, criminal prosecution, and American Indian law. Clinical education presents an interesting intersection between the academic and professional environments. Clinical experiences are designed to maximize the student's abilities to perform newly acquired didactic and psychomotor skills in real patient care situations. A college depends upon clinical education centres to provide supervised learning experiences in which the student has the opportunity to apply the principles learned in the classroom. A fully operational clinic is made up of five key components: 1.The clinic is part of the law school curriculum, and it offers academic credit for student participation in handling cases or projects as well as in a seminar that is taught either before or during the handling of cases or projects; 2.The students work on actual cases or projects, to the extent that local rules for those rules to permit the widest practical scope of the practice of law permit, and with the goal to expand student practice that local conditions permit; 3.The clients of the clinic are generally those who cannot otherwise gain access to legal representation, either due to their poverty, their social marginalization, or the unique or complex nature of their claims; 4.Representation by students is closely supervised by an experienced attorney admitted to practice in the relevant jurisdiction where they appear, preferably a teacher with full or part time status in the law school; 5.Work on real cases is accompanied by a course in the law school, taught with experiential methods such as simulation, role-plays and games, which trains students in the skills, values and ethics of law practice.
22
TYPES OF LEGAL CLINICS

The aims and objective of each type of clinic are in principle the same. The legal clinics may be divided into three types: 1. Simulation clinic: Students can learn from variety of simulations of what happens in
legal practice. Ex moot Court commonplace etc. Cases can be acted out in their entirety, from the taking of initial instructions to a negotiated settlements or Court hearing. Such sessions can be run as intensive courses or spread through all or part of the academic year in weekly slots. Other simulations can range from negotiation exercises, client interviewing exercises, transaction exercises etc. 2. The In-house real client clinics: In this model the clinic is based in the law school. It is
offered, monitored and controlled in law school. In this type of clinic the clients require actual solutions to their actual problems hence it is called as real client clinic. The client may be selected from a section of the public. The service is given in the form of advice only or advice and assistance. In this type of Clinics, Clients are interviewed and advised orally or in writing and also helped with the preparation of their cases. The clinic may operate as a paralegal services or a fully-fledged solicitors practice. 3. The out-house clinic: It is a clinic that involves students in exercising legal work
outside the college or university. These types of clinics may operate on the basis of advice giving only. Such agencies are run by trade union councils and other non-statutory bodies. The clinic might take the form of placement also in solicitors office or barristers chambers. Simulation clinic has several advantages than other clinics. In this type of clinic risk and unpredictability of the real-client work are removed, the same materials are used for many times and hence cost is substantially less than real clinic. The administration of the simulation is very difficult. But all the clinics play active part in Clinical Legal Education and also their objectives and aims are same.
23
HISTORY OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION

Clinical Legal Education includes not only the clinical courses but also practice-oriented courses and activities included in or offered outside the curriculum. Clinical Legal Education is more than a vehicle for the study of lawyering and the legal profession. Clinical Legal Education should be devised and implemented; this will give law students a deeper and more meaningful understanding of law. Clinical Legal Education in India has its roots in both the Legal Aid and Legal Education Reform Movements. Formal Legal Education started in 1855, in India. Many commissions and Committees were set up for the development of Clinical Legal Education in India. Legal Education has gone through many stages of development. Some of these stages are The Bombay Legal Education Committee concluded in 1949, recommended that practical courses should be made compulsory only for students who choose to enter the profession of law and the teaching method should include seminars or group discussions, moot court competitions etc. The 14th report of the Law Commission of India recognized the importance of professional training and for a balance of both academic and vocational training. It recommended that University training must be followed by a professional course concentrating on practical knowledgebut it suggested that the professional course be made compulsory only for those who chose to practice law in the courts. The Commissions 1958 Report concentrated on institutionalizing and improving the overall standards of legal education. In that regard, the Report also discussed teaching methods and suggested that seminars, discussions, monk trials, and simulation exercises should be introduced--- in addition to lectures. Thus, although the Commissions Report didnt deal directly with improving skills, it did so indirectly by supporting the use of teaching methods that could be more helpful in developing various skills. A link between expressed Legal Aid and Legal Education Reform was published in 1970s by the Expert Committee on Legal Aid of the Ministry of Law and Justice. After 5 years of debate over a 3-year v/s 5-year L.L.B. course, which began during a 1977 National Seminar on Legal Education at Bombay, the Bar Council of India (BCI) unanimously agreed to introduce the new 5-year course from July 1982, open to students after 10+2. The BCI recommended practical training in the curriculum. Reports of University Grants Commission (UGC) also played important roles in the history of Clinical Legal 24
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective Education and report emphasized the role of legal education in developing law as a hermeneutical profession, explaining that lawyers must be taught a variety of skills and sensibilities. It outlined the objectives of reformed teaching as making students more responsive to learning and making them demonstrate their understanding of law. The next important step in the evolution of Clinical Legal Education began at the conference of Chief Justice of India in 1993, which resolved the Chief Justice shall constitute a committee to suggest appropriate steps that should be taken to assure that law graduates acquire sufficient experience before they become entitled to practice in the courts. It found that the general standard of law colleges in country was deteriorating and that the syllabus should be revised to include practical subjects so that the students could get professional training. Bar Council of India (BCI) report 1996 on NLSIU (The National Law School of India)The Bar Council of India issued a circular in1997 using its authority under the Advocates Act 1961 directing all universities and law schools to revise their curriculums. It included 21 compulsory courses and 2 optional courses, leaving Universities free to add more courses. The circular also mandated the inclusion of 4 practical papers. Law schools have been required to introduce these 4 practical papers since academic year 1998-99, which was viewed as a big step toward introducing Clinical Legal Education formally into the curriculum. In order to achieve the objects of the clinical programme, NLSIU offers a wide range of opportunities in clinical programmes, compulsory as well as optional, to the
students. At present the compulsory clinical courses are(a) Client Interviewing, counseling, And Alternate Dispute Resolution methods; (b) Litigation Clinic; (c) special Clinic integrated with compulsory placements of two months from III year to V year of the 5 year LL.B. course. The optional component of the scheme includes: a) Moot Court (b) Legal services Clinics; (c) community-based Law Reforms Competition. In addition to the above, NLSIU curriculum carries a full course of 100 marks taught outside the declared clinical courses. This is a compulsory course on Professional Ethics and Law Office management taught with assistance of legal practitioners. The 2nd UGC report of particular interest to Clinical Legal Education was prepared by a Curriculum Development Committee, which was asked to upgrade the syllabi of the LL.B. course. The proposed curriculum also includes several subjects which have a potential to be taught clinically in order to offer instruction in various values and skills required for a new lawyer. Also it introduced a clinical aspect in the LL.M. 25
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective program. Report of the Law Commission of India - 2002 stated that the Commission considers that Clinical Legal Education may be made mandatory subject. Current Assessment: One can trace the development of Clinical Legal education in India to the efforts of a few law schools in the late 1960s. For example, faculty and students at Delhi University established a legal service clinic in 1969 on a voluntary basis. Banaras Hindu University was the first to introduce a clinical course, in the early 1970s. This was an optional course offered to a limited group of 30 students with academic credit for 200 marks. The course included courts visits, participation in a legal aid clinic in the school, and an internship in chambers of lawyers. While each of these early efforts was significant, no steps were taken during those years to institutionalize Clinical Legal Education. A national movement to do so was begun with the opening of the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, established by the Bar Council in 1987 as a model for legal education reform. The National Law Schools curriculum includes several clinical courses, including more recently course that cover the subjects included in the practical papers mandated by the Bar Council of India in 1997. Over the past 10 years, seven other national law schools have been established.
26
DEVELOPMENT OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA
Clinical Legal Education took off in the 1960s as a response to the social and political movements of the time and the perceived irrelevance of traditional legal education. 17 It featured service to poor clients and lay advocates interested in attacking poverty and racism. It represented first and foremost a commitment to social justice and the law. But learning legal skills has also been an important dimension of clinics, defined clinical education as a lawyer-client experience under law school supervision for credit. Clinical legal education is in the midst of an exciting period of growth and development, prompting clinicians around the world to reflect on what clinical educations remarkable successes over the past forty years mean for its future.18 One important item on this agenda that has been on the minds of law teachers in India and the United States, among other countries, is the status of clinical legal educations traditional social justice mission.19 There has been a link between social justice and clinical legal education in India and the United States since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when modern clinical legal education was first coming into its own and law schools in both countries introduced the new clinical teaching methodology through the establishment of legal aid clinics. Clinical education has always had a broader goal to teach law students about what lawyers do and to understand lawyers professional role in the legal system but it carried out that goal in its early years almost exclusively in the context of having students provide various forms of legal aid services.20 Over time, the legal aid dimension of clinical education has been replaced to some extent by a more professional skills-oriented focus as the clinical movement has made important and
17
AM. BAR ASSN SECTION OF LEGAL EDUC. AND ADMISSIONS TO THE BAR, AM. BAR ASSN, LEGAL EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AN EDUCATIONAL CONTINUUM, REPORT OF THE TASK FORCE ON LAW SCHOOLS AND THE PROFESSION: NARROWING THE GAP 133-41 (1992). [hereinafter MACCRATE REPORT]. 18 For example, the 6th International Clinical Conference co-sponsored by UCLA and the University of London in 2005 carried the theme Enriching Clinical Education and included among its purposes reflection on the remarkable growth of the clinical movement worldwide. See conference brochure (on file with authors). See also Margaret Martin Barry, Jon C. Dubin, & Peter A. Joy, Clinical Education for the Millennium: The Third Wave, 7 CLIN. L. REV. 1, 57-60 (2000) (discussing the global aspects of clinical legal educations future). 19 Preserving and supporting a social justice focus for clinical legal education around the world is the key mission of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE). The GAJE website is at http://www.gaje.org. 20 See generally Frank S. Bloch &IqbalIshar, Legal Aid, Public Service and Clinical Legal Education: Future Directions From India and the United States, 12 MICH. J. INTL L.96 (1990). See also CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION: CONCEPT AND CONCERNS, A HANDBOOK ON CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION 17 (N.R. Madhava Menon ed., 1998) [hereinafter HANDBOOK ON CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION]. This linkage existed also in earlier efforts to introduce clinical legal education in the United States, but it found special strength at this time. See infra text accompanying notes 8-11.
27
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective necessary gains in the legal academy, especially in the United States.21 Although social justice remains at the heart of many clinical programs, the effort to obtain broad acceptance of clinical legal education by the legal academy and the bar realized already to a substantial degree in a number of countries around the world seems often to undercut its traditional social justice mission. Clinical Legal Education includes not only the clinical courses but also practice-oriented courses and activities included in or offered outside the curriculum. Clinical Legal Education is more than a vehicle for the study of lawyering and the legal profession. Clinical Legal Education should be devised and implemented; this will give law students a deeper and more meaningful understanding of law. The subject-matter or content of Clinical Legal Education and the Clinical method of law teaching can be separated; the subjects sought to be taught in a clinical course or program can be presented in traditional classes, and the clinical teaching method can be utilized in courses outside the usual clinical subject areas.22 Clinical Legal Education in India has its roots in both the Legal Aid and Legal Education Reform Movements. Formal Legal Education started in 1855, in India. Many commissions and Committees were set up for the development of Clinical Legal Education in India. Legal Education has gone through many stages of development. Some of these stages are The Bombay Legal Education Committee concluded in 1949, recommended that practical courses should be made compulsory only for students who choose to enter the profession of law and the teaching method should include seminars or group discussions, moot court competitions etc.
21
See Stephen Wizner, Beyond Skills Training, 7 CLIN. L. REV. 327, 332 (2001) (clinical legal education has tended to emphasize skills training and professional development over social objectives). But see Peter A. Joy, Political Interference with Clinical Legal Education: Denying Access to Justice, 74 TULANE L. REV. 235, 268 (1999) (describing clinical educations twin goals of teaching lawyering skills and professional values and providing legal services to low-income clients as inextricably intertwined). 22 Richard Lewis, Clinical Legal Education Revisited Professor of Law, Cardiff university, Wales, United Kingdom, Pg. 11 [available at: http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/research/pubs/repository/212] [viewed on: 25/06/2009]
28
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective The 14th Report of the Law Commission of India recognized the importance of professional training and for a balance of both academic and vocational training. It recommended that University training must be followed by a professional course concentrating on practical knowledgebut it suggested that the professional course be made compulsory only for those who chose to practice law in the courts. The Commissions 1958 Report concentrated on institutionalizing and improving the overall standards of legal education. In that regard, the Report also discussed teaching methods and suggested that seminars, discussions, monk trials, and simulation exercises should be introduced--- in addition to lectures. Thus, although the Commissions Report didnt deal directly with improving skills, it did so indirectly by supporting the use of teaching methods that could be more helpful in developing various skills. A link between expressed Legal Aid and Legal Education Reform was published in 1970s by the Expert Committee on Legal Aid of the Ministry of Law and Justice. After 5 years of debate over a 3-year v/s 5-year L.L.B. course, which began during a 1977 National Seminar on Legal Education at Bombay, the Bar Council of India (BCI) unanimously agreed to introduce the new 5-year course from July 1982, open to students after 10+2. The BCI recommended practical training in the curriculum. Reports of University Grants Commission (UGC) also played important roles in the history of Clinical Legal Education and report emphasized the role of legal education in developing law as a hermeneutical profession, explaining that lawyers must be taught a variety of skills and sensibilities. It outlined the objectives of reformed teaching as making students more responsive to learning and making them demonstrate their understanding of law. The next important step in the evolution of Clinical Legal Education began at the conference of Chief Justice of India in 1993, which resolved the Chief Justice shall constitute a committee to suggest appropriate steps that should be taken to assure that law graduates acquire sufficient experience before they become entitled to practice in the courts. It found that the general standard of law colleges in country was deteriorating and that the syllabus should be revised to include practical subjects so that the students could get professional training. Bar Council of India (BCI) report 1996 on NLSIU (The National Law School of India)The Bar Council of India issued a circular in1997 using its authority under the Advocates Act 29
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective 1961 directing all universities and law schools to revise their curriculums. It included 21 compulsory courses and 2 optional courses, leaving Universities free to add more courses. The circular also mandated the inclusion of 4 practical papers. Law schools have been required to introduce these 4 practical papers since academic year 1998-99, which was viewed as a big step toward introducing Clinical Legal Education formally into the curriculum. In order to achieve the objects of the clinical programme, NLSIU offers a wide range of opportunities in clinical programmes, compulsory as well as optional, to the students. At present the compulsory clinical courses are(a) Client Interviewing, counseling, And Alternate Dispute Resolution methods; (b) Litigation Clinic; (c) special Clinic integrated with compulsory placements of two months from III year to V year of the 5 year LL.B. course. The optional component of the scheme includes: a) Moot Court (b) Legal services Clinics; (c) community-based Law Reforms Competition. In addition to the above, NLSIU curriculum carries a full course of 100 marks taught outside the declared clinical courses. This is a compulsory course on Professional Ethics and Law Office management taught with assistance of legal practitioners. The 2nd UGC report of particular interest to Clinical Legal Education was prepared by a Curriculum Development Committee, which was asked to upgrade the syllabi of the LL.B. course. The proposed curriculum also includes several subjects which have a potential to be taught clinically in order to offer instruction in various values and skills required for a new lawyer. Also it introduced a clinical aspect in the LL.M. program. Report of the Law Commission of India - 2002 stated that the Commission considers that Clinical Legal Education may be made mandatory subject. Current Assessment: One can trace the development of Clinical Legal education in India to the efforts of a few law schools in the late 1960s. For example, faculty and students at Delhi University established a legal service clinic in 1969 on a voluntary basis. Banaras Hindu University was the first to introduce a clinical course, in the early 1970s. This was an optional course offered to a limited group of 30 students with academic credit for 200 marks. The course included courts visits, participation in a legal aid clinic in the school, and an internship in chambers of lawyers. While each of these early efforts was significant, no steps were taken during those years to institutionalize Clinical Legal Education. A national movement to do so 30
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective was begun with the opening of the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, established by the Bar Council in 1987 as a model for legal education reform. The National Law Schools curriculum includes several clinical courses, including more recently course that cover the subjects included in the practical papers mandated by the Bar Council of India in 1997. Over the past 10 years, seven other national law schools have been established. Delhi University In the mid 1960s, Delhi University introduced the case method of teaching followed by a few other universities. In 1969, a legal services clinic was set up by some teachers and students of Delhi law Faculty as a purely voluntary activity mainly to provide legal services to inmates of prisons and custodial institutions. The programmes were developed on an ad hoc basis and faculty supervision was marginal. The clinic acted more as an investigating and referral agency rather than as a centre for delivery of services. Student participation was neither consistent nor was the programme supported by the prescribed curriculum for the LL.B. degree. There was no attempt to integrate the clinic with the curriculum excepting perhaps some support derived through the introduction of an optional course called Law and Poverty" in the second year which carried a clinical orientation .The clinic continued to attract some students every year and it diversified its programmes creating a lively interest in clinical programmes amongst an increasing number of faculty members and students. Every year the clinic organizes a week-long orientation course informing the students of the clinics' programmes and encouraging them to participate voluntarily. The programme continues to be voluntary and extra-curricular even today. Delhi Legal Aid Clinic despite being a purely extra-curricular activity did accomplish some impressive results during the recent past. Two Lok Adalats were organized in Delhi in 198586 by the clinic in collaboration with Delhi Legal Aid and Advice Board. Over 150 students were involved in this project another set of students assisted in reaching legal services to the victims of the Bhopal- gas-tragedy .In collaboration with the Department of Adult and Continuing Education, students and teachers of Campus Law Centre now support legal literacy projects amongst the students of several under-graduate colleges of Delhi University and through those students in as many communities in the Union Territory. These activities cannot be called clinical education as such. They are not structured that way; nor are they included in the law curriculum. Supervision is marginal. Though they do contribute to the 31
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective learning experiences of a few law students in a clinical setting, they lack the academic framework for self-directed education. They are more service-oriented programmes which desperately seek academic recognition from the faculty and curricular planners.
Aligarh Muslim University Aligarh Muslim University introduced in its third-year LL.B. class a course on "Advocacy" which introduces students to fact investigation, legal research and writing, court procedures, litigation strategies and issues of professional ethics. However, it does not go far in introducing clinical methodology in terms of self -directed learning on the part of students. In 1985-86, AMU organized few legal aid camps and helped organize a Lok Adalat .A legal aid clinic in the law school is said to be working with limited programmes.
Banaras Hindu University On the recommendation of a faculty Committee, Banaras Hindu University Law School introduced an optional course of Clinical Legal Education in the Vth and VIth semesters with credit for a maximum of 200 marks .The course is open for 30 students each year who are selected on the basis of aptitude and performance in written tests. The method of teaching is through lectures and fieldwork. Fieldwork includes court visits, assignment in the law school legal aid clinic, socio-legal surveying on specific problems and internship in the chamber of lawyers. A faculty committee headed by the Dean manages the clinical course and programmes. The Legal Aid Clinic was set up in the law school under the supervision of a retired judge who was taken as a part-time Professor of the school on a token honorarium. Presently there is a faculty member designated as director of the clinic. Funds for clinic activities initially came from students' contribution, then from the National Service Scheme of the University and later from the University itself. The University Grants Commission provided a special grant for the clinic to expand its legal aid activities to the neighboring rural areas. The clinic has its own bus to transport students on fieldwork.
32
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective Students share the required time between the court, the field and the legal aid clinics' office. Each week the students are expected to spend at least one day in court and report at the office of the assigned lawyer on two occasions.
Another day they are required to spend in the legal aid office doing the work assigned by the teacher in charge. The students and teachers associated with the clinical legal programme go to the villages around the city and undertake programmes of legal literacy, socio-legal surveys on the implementation of welfare legislation and attempt conciliated settlement of disputes through legal aid camps. The students keep separate diaries in which they record their experiences, do the written assignments and get the comments of the teachers / lawyers. The court work is jointly evaluated by the teacher and the lawyer for a maximum of 50 marks. The teacher in charge of the legal aid clinic grades the work of the students in the clinic for a maximum of 50 marks.
It is interesting to note that clinical legal education at Banaras Law School revolves almost entirely around the legal aid clinic and its projects. Although it continues to function with some success it reflects the troubles from which legal aid schemes generally suffer and it does not receive full faculty support. Further, the clinical opportunities provided are limited to a small section of final year students.
During the nineteen seventies a report was prepared by the committee on legal education headed by Chairman Mr. Justice Ormrod which emphasized the need to combine the traditional legal education with instructions in skills and techniques which are essential to enable a person to follow a learned profession. Realizing the error of largely relying upon the apprenticeship method, ignoring the new situations which had developed over a period of time it recommended that new ways and means should be evolved to enable use of new facilities for educating the professional person by supplementing them with training in professional skill and technique. It emphasized the need for a synthesis between the academic and professional and there integration into a coherent whole noticing the isolation between both. It recommended three stages of legal education, the academic stage, the professional 33
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective stage and the continuing education or training. This would enable the individual not only to equip himself with the basic knowledge of the law but also acquaint himself with the skills and techniques so essential to the practice of law. The idea of continuing education or training would enable him to adapt himself to the ever changing scenario in the field of law, so vital for career advancement.
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION
Clinical Legal Education gathered importance globally due to its potential to improve the quality of legal education. As law graduates in India directly enter legal profession without any further training or any Bar Examination Law Colleges in India share the entire responsibility of skill training. As a result Clinical Legal Education assumes more importance in India. The concept of practical problem solving, whether by working in a laboratory or in the field, as an important means of developing skills has been in acknowledged since time immemorial. However, it was in 1901, that a Russian professor, Alexander Lyublinsky, first proposed Clinical Education in law on similar lines as in medicine.
The earliest reference on Clinical Legal Education in United States could be traced in the year of 1917. Since that time, Clinical teaching has become an integral part of legal education in most developed and developing countries. The global Clinical movement started taking hold in the late 1960s; however, by that time Law Schools in the U.S. took the lead in providing Clinical Legal Education. In most of the countries initially the primary focus of Clinical Legal Education was on legal aid, social justice and professional responsibility. However, this focus began to shift from client and community service to teaching skills, particularly in U.S. due to fading of student interest in public interest work. Thus, the concept of Clinical Legal Education has evolved and contributed a new pedagogy in the teaching of law. It, to a large extent, also plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between the theory and real-life practice of law, or at least the environment in which they operate. The dearth of clinical legal education programs in the first half of the twentieth century reflects several conditions that law schools faced in that era.
34
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective First, law schools were distinguishing themselves from apprenticeships, and clinical legal education efforts to create "model law offices" as part of law school education did not further this market differentiation. Second, law schools of this era were terribly under-funded and clinical legal education courses with intensive faculty supervision were not as economical as large classes employing the casebook Socratic method. Third, law school teachers of this era disagreed about the value and feasibility - of teaching lawyering skills other than legal analysis. For example, a 1944 Report of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Curriculum Committee, primarily authored by Karl Llewellyn, noted that the "current case-instruction is somehow failing to do the job of producing reliable professional competence on the by-product side in half or more of our end product, our graduates. Fourth, the period from the 1920's to the 1940's was marked by ABA and AALS efforts to create and raise standards for law schools, and none of these standards focused on encouraging or requiring clinical legal education experiences. These above four factors combined not only to limit the number of clinical programs but also to stunt the growth of clinical pedagogy by limiting the number of law faculty teaching clinical courses. In the 1950's, there was no single vision of clinical legal education and the concept of a law school "legal aid clinic" encompassed any "law school sponsored program for law student work on legal aid cases."23 A 1951 study of clinical programs identified twenty-eight clinics run by law schools, independent legal societies, or public defender offices. At five schools, a clinical legal education experience was mandated, but most schools offered clinics as electives or extra-curricular activities. The work assigned to students varied among programs, but typically included client and witness interviews, drafting pleadings, and preparation of legal documents. Some programs gave students the opportunity to negotiate matters with clients' creditors, and at least nine law school clinics provided opportunities for trials and other court appearances. Most clinics attempted to have students work on cases from beginning to end. Student supervision was cited as a "major problem," and the task of
23
Quintin Johnstone, Law School Clinics, 3 J. Legal Educ. 535, 535 (1951).
35
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective supervision was often delegated to experienced students, who supervised less experienced students. At ten of the twenty-eight law schools with some form of clinical program in 1951, students did not earn any academic credit for their work. At four schools, clinic credit was available as part of a student's credits for a general course on legal practice. At the remaining fourteen schools, students only earned between one and three hours of credit for clinic work. By the end of the 1950's, thirty-five law schools reported "some form of legal aid clinic."24 In thirteen of these law schools, legal aid clinics were located inside the schools. In a few law schools, all or most law students were required to do some legal aid work. In fifteen laws schools, students were able to earn limited academic credit for clinic work. In only five law schools, supervising faculty were able to receive teaching credit for their clinical courses. Although the number of clinical legal education programs increased slightly from the late 1940's to the early 1950's, the late 1950's ended on a note of relative stagnation for the nascent clinical legal education movement. There were several different models of clinical programs, and no generally accepted definition or description. Schools defined "clinical" programs to include both credit-earning and non-credit-earning real-life experiences for law students either in programs located within the law school or offsite at legal aid or public defender offices. The level of faculty involvement and supervision varied greatly, and clinical experiences existed on the fringes of the law school curriculum. The limited growth of clinical programs during this decade may reflect the fact that clinical instruction was only one of several experiments under way to address perceived deficiencies of the casebook method. Some of the other "experiments" included simulated trial practice courses, legal research and writing courses, drafting courses, and subject matter seminars based on simulated problems. Notwithstanding these "experiments" many of which are now standard fare in virtually all law schools the 1960's witnessed continued complaints by law students and some law faculty about large classes, the dominance of the casebook method, and the lack of writing opportunities. Of all the curricular experiments since the introduction of the casebook method in the late nineteenth century, "the concept of clinical legal education was to prove the most important." In fact, clinical legal education is "so often called the most significant change in how law was taught since the invention of the case method that it now sounds trite.25Until
24 25
AALS Proceedings 121, 121 (1959) Philip G. Schrag& Michael Meltsner, Reflections on Clinical Legal Education 5 (1998).
36
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective Clinical programs entered the scene, skills training and social justice work were for all intents and purposes, off the legal education agenda. Legal doctrines dominated the Law School syllabi, with virtually all instruction offered through classroom courses dominated by traditional lectures in India. Legal education was Law School, not lawyer school. Introduction of Clinical Legal Education changed this scenario. Clinical Legal Education is directed towards developing the perception, attitudes, skills and sense of responsibilities which the lawyers are expected to assume when they complete their professional education. Thus, Clinical Legal Education provides students with opportunities for professional and intellectual development and prepares them for the practice of law, as competent, and socially as well as professionally responsible lawyers. Clinical Legal Education took its roots in India in the late 1960s. But Clinical Legal Education becomes integral part of curriculum only when BCI introduced four practical papers to improve standards in legal education in late 90s. These papers are aimed at providing practical training to law students. Until these papers were introduced in the curriculum, very little effort was made by Law Colleges to train students in advocacy skills. Clinical Legal Education in India offers an opportunity to make integrative transformation of legal education and at the same time make legal profession socially relevant. To make such a transformation Clinical Legal Education should be viewed as a method of teaching and understanding law effectively rather than a component to offer mere skills. The complexities of modern life require lawyers to play multiple roles such as advisors, negotiators, arbitrators, mediators, and administrators. The present day legal profession calls for much more skills than what was required of a legal practitioner a decade or so back. The field of lawyering is becoming highly competitive in that sense. Clinical Legal Education justifies the existence of law school in communitys context. The faculty will be benefited by the real life situations. This enriched experience in dealing with practical problems of the members of the society strengthens their theoretical knowledge of law. This in turn garners the benefits of teaching law in social context to the students. Therefore, the ideology and pedagogy used in teaching in V.M. Salgaocar College is to make the legal education socially relevant. Clinical legal education emerged out of recognition that while a traditional academic curriculum could teach legal principles, it took practical experience to know how to apply those principles correctly and with confidence. The legal clinic concept was first discussed at the turn of the twentieth century by two professors as a variant of the medical clinic model. Russian professor Alexander I. Lyublinsky in 1901, quoting an article in a German journal, 37
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective and American professor William Rowe, in a 1917 article, each wrote about the concept of a legal clinic. Both professors associated it with the medical professions tradition of requiring medical students to train in functioning clinics ministering to real patients under the supervision of experienced physicians. This call for a clinical component to legal education was not an attempt to replicate the apprenticeship system that already existed in many countries, in which students worked outside the law school under the supervision of an experienced practitioner. Instead, it was a call for a new type of education that would offer students the opportunity to experience the realities of legal practice and the context in which laws develop, within the structured laboratory of legal education. Although some legal clinics were operating in the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century, the clinical legal education concept did not take hold in U.S. law schools on a large scale until the 1960s. Law schools in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe seriously began to consider clinical legal education in the 1990s. One reason for the development of clinical legal education in the 1960s was the general societal focus at that time on civil rights and an antipoverty agenda. Law students were demanding a relevant legal education, one that would give them the opportunity to learn how to address the unmet legal needs of poor people in the communities in which they were studying law. The Ford Foundation saw the value of clinical legal education and funded clinics in their initial phases through the Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (CLEPR). CLEPR grants enabled legal clinics to flourish, and once law faculties, students, and administrators saw the virtues of clinical legal education, law schools began to fund them from their general budgets. Over the past three decades, law clinics in U.S. law schools have evolved from an elective component within a handful of curricula into an integral part of legal education. Most U.S. law schools have clinics, clinical law professors generally have some kind of long-term status within the law school, and students earn academic credit for their participation. Parallel to these developments, clinical law school programs have developed in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and other Commonwealth countries. Countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa have also developed clinical programs designed to meet their societies dual needs for improved legal representation of those who cannot afford to pay for legal services and for more practically oriented legal education. For example, in South Africa in 1983, there were 38
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective only two university legal aid clinics; by 1992, sixteen of the twenty-one law schools had legal aid clinics. Meanwhile, in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, the clinical movement has spread from several experimental programs in the mid-1990s to more than sixty law schools in 2001. Clinical legal education is so well entrenched in some countries that there are associations of clinical teachers which meet on a regular basis to discuss many of the issues this chapter raises. In the United States there is the clinical section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA), and the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). In the United Kingdom there is the Clinical Legal Education Organization (CLEO), and in South Africa the Association of University Legal Aid Institutions. In addition, the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) was started in 1996 to promote socially relevant legal education by forming an internationally active network for the exchange of information and ideas on justice education. The inaugural GAJE international conference was held in India in December 1999, with the second conference scheduled for December 2001 in South Africa.
39
LEGAL EDUCATION REFORM AND LAW SCHOOL-BASED LEGAL AID CLINICS IN INDIA: LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE-BASED CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION
During British rule, legal education in India followed the general colonial model of producing clerks, not managers or advocates. Its primary goal was to support the existing financial interests of England, certainly not to reform the local legal profession.26 After independence, legal education was expected to bring the legal system in tune with the social, economic, and political desires of the country.27 With 500 law schools and 40,000 law students graduating every year,28 law schools could play a pivotal role in promoting and providing justice, particularly through the field of legal aid? As noted earlier, the contemporary legal aid movement began in independent India in the early 1960s, at about the same time as legal services programs expanded considerably in the United States. Unlike in the United States, however, the focus of the legal aid movement in India has not been on individual client representation but rather on providing legal aid to indigent people at large.29 Thus, in conjunction with the 42nd Amendment to Indian Constitution giving free legal aid constitutional status under Article 39A Parliament passed the Legal Services Authority Act, 1987, which aims at both providing free legal aid and organizing lokadalats(peoples courts) to secure quick justice at low cost. More recently, the Central Government proposed establishing Gram Nyayalayas (informal courts) to provide
26
INTERIM REPORT OF AUXILIARY COMMITTEE OF THE INDIAN STATUTORY COMMISSION ON REVIEW OF THE GROWTH OF EDUCATION IN BRITISH INDIA, 11 (Government of India, Calcutta 1930). 27 A. S. Anand, H.L. Sarin Memorial Lecture: Legal Education in India Past, Present and Future, (1998) 3 SCC (JOUR) 1, 2. 28 N. L. Mitra, Legal Education in India, Conference of International Legal Educators,Florence, Italy (2000) available at http://www.aals.org/2000international/english/India.htm(last visited on Aug. 20, 2006). Currently there are 193 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association.http://www.abanet.org/legaled/approvedlawschools/approved. html (last visited Sept. 16, 2006). Just over 40,000 students graduated from ABA accredited law schools in 2004. Seehttp://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/jd.html (last visited Sept. 16, 2006). 29 Bloch &Ishar, supra note 3, at 96. This has begun to change in India; for example, the Delhi Legal Services Authority is now running twenty-eight legal aid centers and a 24-hour hotline at permanent legal services clinics to provide legal aid to individual clients. See http://dlsa.gov.in (last visited Aug. 23, 2006).
40
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective justice in rural areas at a grass root level.30 Early on, a consensus developed within the Indian legal community that law schools should play an active role in the legal aid movement. Although some schools were receptive, early responses to this call were less than satisfactory. There is now a renewed effort to reform legal education that offers the legal academy, the bench, and the bar the opportunity to realize the shared goals of meeting service needs and education reform through social justice-based clinical legal education.
EARLY EFFORTS TO LINK LEGAL AID AND LEGAL EDUCATION REFORM
The first major report on legal aid came in 1973 from the Expert Committee on Legal Aid of the Ministry of Law and Justice, chaired by Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer. 31 The Expert Committee was appointed in the Silver Jubilee year of Independence to make recommendations for the creation and implementation of a comprehensive program of legal aid to the weaker sections of Indian society, including persons of limited means and socially and educationally backward classes. In stressing the need for a statutory basis for legal aid, the Committee said that legal aid is an integral part of the legal system not a matter of charity or confined to the four walls of the court building. The Committees report advocated creating networks of legal aid groups in various places such as court houses, bar associations, law schools, community organizations, private and public agencies, and organs of local government. Recommendations ranged from establishing an autonomous national legal aid authority, to compulsory public service as a part of law school curricula, to giving priority to candidates social sympathies in filling judicial and police posts. The Committees report also stressed the
30
See The Gram Nyaalayas Bill, 2005. Nyaayalays are panchayat-level (county level)courts that serve lowpopulation jurisdictions. They are, in effect, the lowest court of the State judiciary and operate as traditional courts but at the grass-roots level. Lok Adalats,on the other hand, are designed to help settle disputes between the parties that may be pending before any court, as well as matters at the pre-litigation stage. Lokadalats arediscussed also infra at text accompanying notes 135-38. 31 See EXPERT COMMITTEE REPORT, supra note 14. Justice Krishna Iyer, known as a pioneer in protecting prisoners constitutional rights, held various legislative and ministerial posts, was a judge of the High Court of Kerala, and served on the Law Commission of India before being elevated to the Supreme Court of India in 1973.
41
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective need to modify the law school curriculum in order to focus on the needs of citizens and to provide actual legal aid services. The Committee recommended introducing clinical legal education in law schools with a focus on socio-economic poverty. It opined that student exposure to real legal problems would benefit the students, the legal aid scheme, and the legal system as a whole. It also observed that students encounters with the problems of poverty and exploitation would change their outlook when they become lawyers, and as a result they would not treat clients simply as facts but as living neighbors. On the benefits of involving law schools in legal aid programs, the Committee pointed out those law students would become an inexpensive and enthusiastic resource for providing meaningful legal aid to Indias vast population. It recommended using law students to provide legal aid in two stages: first, in preparing a case at the preliminary stages, including interviewing clients and drafting documents; then, by appearing in court in petty cases, including examining witnesses and presenting arguments.32 Thus, the central idea of involving the law schools was not only to provide practical skills but also to secure adequate legal aid for the needy. In 1977, the Committee on National Juridicare submitted its report.33 The Juridicare Committee was intended to revise, update, revaluate, and supplement the report of Expert Committee, and its report concentrated more on the liability and working conditions of legal aid programs.34 The JuridicareCommittee recognized the value of lawyers services in
seeking remedies or asserting rights, and placed comprehensive legal aid projects as a high priority in the States responsibility. The main thrust of the report was the recognition that a legal services program that reflected western attitudes and ideals cannot work successfully in India because only a few of the problems of the poor are true legal problems. The Committee believed that a legal aid program should aim at radical transformation of the socio-economic structure, and concluded that the legal profession must recognize law as a potential instrument to eradicate poverty by securing equal distribution of material resources of
32
At the time, and still today, there was no student practice rule in India. Seeinfra note 45 and accompanying text. 33 JURIDICARE COMMITTEE REPORT, supra note 15. 34 Members of the Committee met with members of government, Bar associations, theJudiciary, and actual beneficiaries of legal aid schemes, and examined various experimentsin legal aid at the village and municipal levels in order to devise a comprehensive free legalservice program.
42
the country. 35 The Juridicare Committee expected law schools to play a pivotal role in providing legal aid and urged them to establish legal aid clinics. It observed that student participation in legal aid would not only be helpful in acquiring the skills necessary in the legal market place, but would also provide an opportunity for the students to develop a humanistic perspective and a social orientation. Students would realize the social role of the law, and their participation in clinical projects would reduce the burden of legal services institutions. For the first time, this report expressed the need to develop clinical law teachers, to introduce subjects such as law and poverty and law and society, and to give academic support to law school clinics. In 1981, the government of India appointed the Committee for Implementing Legal Aid Schemes. The Committee was headed by Justice P.N. Bhagwati, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India. Like the earlier Juridicare Committee, the Committee for Implementing Legal Aid Schemes insisted that court- or litigation-oriented legal aid programs cannot provide social justice in India. The Committee concentrated more on the promotion of legal literacy, the organization of legal aid camps to carry legal services to the doorsteps of people, training of paralegals to support legal aid programs, establishing legal aid clinics in law schools and universities, and bringing class actions by way of public interest litigation.36 Further, Justice Bhagwati acknowledged the significance of the educational process in its task: Education efforts must become a significant factor contributing to the social development of the poor.37
Dashed Expectations: Legal Educations Limited Response

In spite of these high expectations, only limited efforts were made to transform legal education in India to meet the challenges of the profession. The momentum gathered by the legal aid movement was confined at most law schools to student extracurricular activity, with a few exceptions. Delhi University, for example, established a legal aid clinic in the late 1960s. Faculty participation was purely voluntary and no attempts were made to integrate
35 36
JURIDICARE COMMITTEE REPORT, supra note 15, at 25. REPORT OF COMMITTEE FOR IMPLEMENTING LEGAL AID SCHEMES (1981). 37 From the Chairman, LEGAL AID NEWSLETTER 2 (Feb. 1983) cited in JagatNarain, Legal Aid Litigational or Educational: An Indian Experiment, 28 J.I.L.I. 72, 76 (1986).
43
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective clinics into the curriculum.38 Nonetheless, and in spite of the fact that the students were offered no credit, the legal aid clinic attracted many students. Banaras Hindu University was the first law school in India to introduce a clinical course, in the early 1970s. It was an optional course with academic credit, offered to a limited group of thirty students in the final LL.B. year. The course included court visits, participation in a legal aid clinic, and an internship in chambers of lawyers. It was clear, however, that the legal aid clinic, which was located at the school and supervised by a retired judge on a token honorarium, was at the centre of the law schools conception of clinical legal education. Aligarh Muslim University organized a few legal aid camps in the mid-1980s and also introduced a course on advocacy that exposed students to such topics as factual investigation, legal research and writing, and litigation strategies. But no steps were taken to incorporate clinical legal education into the curriculum and participation in the legal aid camps was voluntary. Although these efforts were encouraging at the time, no serious efforts were made by academics or members of the legal community or by the Bar Council of India, the primary body regulating legal education to institutionalize legal aid clinics. The main reason for this failure was that law schools were neither physically nor professionally ready to undertake such a huge responsibility. In order to implement law school-based legal aid programs at the national level, the first task should have been to prepare law schools to shoulder the responsibility. Several factors that have marred law school education in India over the past several decades also help explain why law schools have failed in their mission of providing legal aid. First and foremost, most law teachers have no practical knowledge in conducting legal aid because the Advocates Act prohibits fulltime teachers from practicing law. There is also no provision for licensing law students to practice.39 Moreover, no efforts have been made to provide financial assistance to law schools in order to meet the expenses of providing legal aid and there are no incentives such as reducing teaching hours for teachers to engage in legal aid activities.
38
N.R. Madhava Menon CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION: CONCEPT AND CONCERNS, A HANDBOOK ON CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION , 1998 39 See Advocates Act, 1961 29, 33 (providing that only enrolled advocates are entitled to practice law).
44
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective Another fundamental problem comes from the fact that for some time there has been a general feeling that legal education in India is not meaningful or relevant.40 In its 1958 report, the Law Commission of India painted the following bleak picture of the standards of legal education: The portals of our law teaching institutions manned by part-time teachers open even wider and are accessible to any graduate of mediocre ability and indifferent merits . . . there is hardly a pretence at teaching . . . this character is followed by law examinations . . . which the students manage to pass by cramming short summaries published by enterprising publishers . . . the result, a plethora of LL.B., half-baked lawyers, who do not know even the elements of law and who are let loose upon society as drones and parasites in different parts of the country.41 The curriculum was neither helpful in shaping aspiring lawyers in their traditional role of problem solver nor in their expanded roles of arbitrator, counselor, negotiator, or administrator. The dominant teaching approach was lecture, with little or no attention paid to underlying principles or social intricacies that resulted in shaping the particular rule. Students had no exposure to the policy underlying the law, the function of the law, or the needs of the nation and the expectations of the people.42 No effort was made to understand the law in a social context. In the words of Professor Mohammad Gouse, law students were not alive to the dynamic role of law in the development of the country.43 Perhaps in response to this phenomenon, there followed a prolonged neglect of legal education during which a large number of substandard institutions and teaching shops grew up around the country with large numbers of students. As a result, admission to law school became disorganized and the quality of students admitted deteriorated.44 Although there were exceptions, most law schools failed to attract highly qualified students to the legal
40 41
I.P.Massey, Quest For Relevance in Legal Education, 2 SCC (JOUR) 17 (1971). See THE LAW COMMISSION OF INDIA, REPORT ON REFORM OF JUDICIAL ADMINISTRATION 523 (1958). These remarks were made by the Commission when there were only forty-three law institutes training 20,159 students. 42 Mohammad Ghouse, Legal Education in India: Problems and Perspective, 19 J.I.L.I. 337, 337-48 (1977) (reviewing LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA: PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES (S.K. Agarwala ed., 1973)). 43 ibid 44 ibid
45
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective profession.45 The situation was exacerbated by meagre salaries paid to law teachers; because of low salaries, the teaching profession did not attract many brilliant persons to law teaching. Further, the teaching faculty was over burdened by heavy teaching loads. Many colleges had large numbers of part-time teachers, which resulted in overloading the full-time teachers with additional administrative and committee duties.46 A New Opportunity for Reform: The Ahmadi Report and the Bar Councils Mandatory Practical Papers This bleak experience perhaps finally taught the Indian legal community that involving law schools in providing legal aid or other assistance to society needs careful planning and, most importantly, that legal education needs a facelift to cope with societys expectation. Thus, several important initiatives have been undertaken in India recently to refocus attention on improving legal education most notably those by the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Bar Council of India (BCI), and the Law Commission of India.47 The UGC is the prime body in India for regulating and maintaining the standards of higher education. In 1988, the UGC appointed a Curriculum Development Committee (CDC) with Professor Upendra Baxi as chairman. The Baxi Committee tried to improve law school syllabi to make them socially relevant: Human resource development in law is perceived by the CDC not just in terms of production of efficient professionals. While this is important, it is so only if the underlying model of professionalism is linked with struggles for social justice, the maintenance of the rule of law and of democratic development . . . .48 According to a second Curriculum Development Committee, appointed in 2000, the first committees recommendations were ambitious in nature, substantive in content (some new subjects were introduced with an interdisciplinary approach, including Law and Poverty and Law and Rural Development), and had a rich vision for the future. There is also a standing panel at the UGC to guide and standardize legal education in India, presided over by the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India. In spite of these efforts, no significant improvement in the
45
Taylor Von Mehren, Law and Legal Education in India: Some Observations, 78 HARV. L. REV. 1180, 1186 (1965). 46 Taylor Von Mehren, supra note 52 47 See LAW COMMISSION OF INDIA, 14TH REPORT (1958); EXPERT COMMITTEE REPORT, ; JURIDICARE COMMITTEE REPORT,; REPORT OF COMMITTEE FOR IMPLEMENTING LEGAL AID SCHEMES (1981); REPORT OF CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTRE (1988-90) (known popularly as the Baxi Committee); REPORT OF JUSTICE AHMADI COMMITTEE (1994; LAW COMMISSION OF INDIA, 184TH REPORT (2002). 48 REPORT OF THE CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTRE, supra note 47
46
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective standards of law schools was achieved; lack of faculty expertise in the new subjects, unavailability of textbooks, and lack of flexibility in teaching and assessing in subjects like poverty and rural development made these socially relevant courses ineffective. In 1994, a Committee chaired by Justice Ahmadi dealt elaborately with law school teaching methods. The Ahmadi Committee Report recommended inclusion of the problem method, moot courts, and mock trials in law school curricula. It also suggested supplementing the lecture method with the case method, tutorials, and other modern techniques for imparting legal education. Further, it recommended that all these new methods be made mandatory. The Committee also suggested the establishment of premier law schools to improve legal education along the lines of the National Law School of India University in Bangalore. As a result, several additional national law schools were established all over India. Although these national law schools tend to improve legal education, they could not affect a significant improvement as a far larger number of students graduate from other law schools.49 In 1997, following the Ahmadi Committees recommendations about practical training and the filing of cases in several high courts challenging its new rule reviving a one-year training requirement under senior advocates, the BCI issued a circular directing all universities and law schools to revise their curricula and directed them to incorporate four Practical Papers.50 Until these papers were introduced in the curriculum, very little effort had been made by law schools to train students in advocacy skills. Law schools felt that training law students to work in the legal profession was not the job of the schools but of the Bar. The Bar Councils action was viewed as a big step toward introducing clinical legal education formally into the curriculum and law schools have been required to introduce the four papers since academic year 1998-99. On their face, the papers focus mainly on practical training. Paper I addresses instruction in litigation skills, including pre-trial preparation and trial practice. Paper II takes up various drafting skills, including pleading and conveyancing. Paper III covers professional matters, such as ethics and bar-bench relations. The exception is Paper IV, which includes legal aid work and other aspects of public interest lawyering. As shown later in this article,
49
The Law Commission of India also stressed the need to improve legal education in other colleges which form 99 percent of the law colleges in India: It is the desire of the Law Commission that the Bar Council of India and the academic community must coordinate and take steps which can result in upgrading the standards of legal education in these colleges which are spread over length and breadth of the country. A few bright-star colleges with limited number of student-intake based on all-India selection is not the end and may not result in an overall change in the level of legal education. LAW COMMISSION OF INDIA, 184TH REPORT, supra note 47 50 Bar Council of India, Circular No. 4/1997.
47
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective the four papers can be read together more broadly to support social justice-based curriculum reform.65 So far, however, most legal educators see them as providing only limited support for including instruction in social justice lawyering in the new curriculum or for providing social justice to indigent clients. Further, the Bar Council did not assume any responsibility for implementing its new directive. The responsibility for training law students in practical matters was simply passed on to the law schools. Because Bar Council directives are mandatory, law schools made half hearted attempts to fulfil their obligations despite having neither the expertise in skills training nor the infrastructure and financial resources needed to implement these papers. Even to the extent that some meagre resources were made available, law schools failed to execute these directives because they were viewed as an additional burden on the faculty. Simply put, law faculty neither had a vision for, nor properly understood, the value of these papers. Finally, in 2002 and after considering the Ahmadi Committee Report the Law Commission of India took up legal education reform in its 184th Report. Noting that legal education is fundamental to the judicial system, the Commission suggested that clinical legal education should be made compulsory and opined that clinical legal education will be an excellent supplement to the legal aid system.
REVIEWING CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION
Those using legal services have a direct interest in the competence and aptitude of their legal representatives. Whether a client consults a lawyer because he or she needs a will drafting, wants to move house, seeks compensation for an injury suffered or has been changed with a criminal offence, the lawyer, the client may expect is likely to meet certain professional and ethical standards. The lawyer of course may not end up lingering a case for the client. Students who study law at university or college or perhaps through a form of apprenticeship, have ideals in terms of their prospects as eventual practitioners.
48
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective The legal profession has traditionally taken a direct role in the regulation and, in part, provision of legal education and, for a considerable period, provided the overtly vocational courses that were a pre-requisite for admission. Employers have a vested interest too. Apart form the need to supply the profession with competent pardoners, prospective employers will be on the look out for staff that have the legal and transferable skills relevant to the job market. There is also a governmental agenda. The massive expansion in the UK of the undergraduate student market has a dramatic impact on the graduate numbers in law and in other disciplines. Much has been heard under the present Labour government of the need for joined-up thinking. The importance of having a legally literate society is now recognised at governmental level and lawyers have a key role in addressing rights awareness as a precursor to access to justice. The wider public may also have reason to take more than a passing interest in legal education. Apart from individual concerns as actual or potential clients of lawyers, members of the public are presumable concerned that the legal profession, as a whole, strives for and reaches requisite professional standards. We suggest, therefore, that the stakeholders identified have a common interest in both the quality of legal service available and in the education that forms the foundation for such provision. We maintain that to meet the expectations of all interested parties newly qualified lawyers should have a sufficient grasp of the relevant knowledge, skills and values to enable them to meet the may and varied needs of their clients. At the point of qualification a lawyer should be able to apply these facets of competence to produce appropriate and sustainable results for their clients in whatever dispute or transaction that may be involved. The learning process through which this overall position may be achieved has been described in detail elsewhere. The key stages in this process, in ascending order of depth of learning, are termed by bloom et al as: Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis
49
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective Synthesis Evaluation
It is our view that a (law) student is significantly disadvantaged if he or she is denied the opportunity of applying theory to practice and of having the chance to take apart that experience and reflect on the lessons to be learnt form that process- what happened and why, what might have happened and what would be done differently another time. This article looks at the future of legal education in England and Wales and further a-field in a clinical context. We look in particular at perceptions of what legal education should aspire to from an international perspective and at two particular examples of clinical practice that illustrate how the aspirations identified can be achieved.
CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION AND PRACTICAL TRAINING PAPERS In 1994 Justice Ahmadi Committee Report dealt elaborately with teaching methods. After reviewing the recommendations made by Justice Ahmadi Committee, the Bar Council of India(BCI) introduced a one year training rule. The Report recommended inclusion of the problem method, moot courts, and mock trials in law college curricula. It also suggested supplementing the lecture method with the case method, tutorials and other modern techniques for imparting legal education. Further it recommends all these new methods be made mandatory, it discarded the suggestion of bar examination as a prerequisite to enrolment. However, the BCI received a setback when this rule was challenged in the Supreme Court in V Sudheer v. Bar Council of India 13 (1999) 3.SCC 176 the Supreme Court struck down the rule as ultra vires to the Advocates Act and held that the Bar Council of India is not competent to pass such a rule. Such rule can be introduced only by the legislature. It was in response to the Apex court's decision that the Bar Council of India introduced the four practical papers to improve the standards of legal education, namely1. MootCourt,PreTrial preparation and participation in trial proceedings.
50
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective 2. Drafting, Pleading and Conveyancing. 3. Professional Ethics, Accountancy for lawyer and Bar-Bench relations. 4. Public Interest lawyers, Legal Aid and Para-Legal Aid Services. These papers are aimed at providing practical training to law students. Until these papers were introduced in the curriculum very little efforts was made by law colleges to train students in skills of advocacy. Law colleges felt that training law students to work in the legal profession was not the job of the colleges but of the Bar. With the introduction of these practical papers, it is now mandatory for all law colleges to provide practical training. The Bar Council of India successfully thrust its responsibility of providing skills to the young entrants by incorporating four practical papers in LL.B. curriculum. The Practical Papers in Reality: Their Limited Scope and Effectiveness Although the four papers, on their face, appear adequate to provide certain basic skills tolaw students, in reality they have not met even the limited expectations of the Bar Council let alone the long term goal of establishing a fair, effective, and competent legal system,accessible to all citizens. As noted earlier, most Indian law schools are not able toimpl ement these papers due to a lack of expertise; they have neither the infrastructure nor the personnel to implement them. Many law schools faculty have no familiarity with thenew subjects and, due to the no-practice rule, the majority of faculty members do not havethe necessary practical knowledge or experience. In effect, the Bar Council washed itshands of the matter by simply passing the obligation on to law schools and the lawschools have, in turn, relinquished their responsibility by assigning the four papers to thefaculty without providing necessary support. The four papers are, in effect, paper tigers;most schools have introduced these papers with only token compliance, passing all studentswithout observing serious standards. And most unfortunate of all, everyone seems to behappy; the Bar Council can claim it made its effort to improve legal education, law schoolscan claim they have successfully incorporated practical training, the faculty breathe a sighof relief that the new system does not affect them much, and the students continue
tograduate. Nonetheless, the four papers have caused considerable debate in India. Thisdebate must now turn to the future and address seriously the legal academys ultimateambitions for the papers and their potential to guide legal education reform.
51
History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective C. Creating a New Reality: The Practical Papers as the Basis for a Social-justiceBased Clinical Curriculum Law schools are now in a position to accept responsibility for the practical training calledfor in the four Practical Papers. What is needed to make these papers meaningful is acombined effort from the law schools, the Bar, and the bench to implement them finallythrough a model of social justice-based clinical legal education and to do so keeping inmind the principles behind the fundamental values and skills set out above. The purpose of legal education is not simply to encourage the lawyers function as champion of his or her clients cause; lawyers are also educators, policy makers, and counselors. Lawyers can make people aware of their legal rights and duties and they can bring public opinion to bear on law making, thus helping make the law more responsive to national concerns. By producing such lawyers, law schools can begin to serve Indias social justice needs.
52
CONCLUSION
It is necessary to emphasize that the purpose and scope of legal education must be to prepare students for the practice of the profession of law. Therefore, the law and legal education which together constitute the backbone of society should change according to the changing needs and interests of the ever changing society. Undoubtedly clinical work will be more expensive than class room teaching. The time frame of curriculum will be difficult to maintain as stated by the university. There are some things which are good for clinical experience is enabling students to understand experimentally how the law works in practice. Hence clinic must be included as a part of curriculum. To promote clinical legal education in India, it is critical: for the Bar Council to amend its rules to allow law professors to practice in the course of teaching a clinical class and encourage law schools to dedicate faculty to teaching clinics and offer students credits for participating in clinics; for vice-chancellors and other administrators of Indian law schools to devote resources to hiring faculty and offering clinic classes with low student-teacher ratios; for law professors to develop sustainable clinics and work with law school administration to implement them; for non-governmental organizations to collaborate with law schools to further their work with communities and advance the social justice mission of education; for legal services authorities to broaden the scope of legal aid by supporting law schools to make legal aid and advice easily accessible to communities within the premises of law schools; and
for grant making or funding agencies to fund law-school-based legal clinics to engage with communities in strengthening democracy and improving governance for the advancement of justice and the rule of law.
53
Bibliography
Central India Laws, Quarterly Vol. VII 1994. R.K. Roy, Legal Education in India 21st Century Problems & Prospects. Margaret M. Barry, Teaching Social Justice Lawyering: Systematically Including Community Legal Education in Law School Clinics, 18 CLINICAL L. REV. 401 (2012). Frank S. Bloch & M.R.K. Prasad, Institutionalizing a Social Justice Mission for Clinical Legal Education: Cross-National Currents from India and the United States, 13 CLINICAL L. REV. 165 (2006). N.R. Madhava Menon, ed., A handbook on Clinical Legal education (1998) Ajay Pandey, Experimenting with Clinical Legal Education to Address the Disconnect between the Larger Promise of Law and its Grassroots Reality in India, 26 MD. J. INTL L. 135 (2011).
54

Clinical Legal Education Jha

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Исходное описание:

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Clinical Legal Education Jha

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

An assignment of Clinical education

Topic:-History of Clinical Education: An Indian and International perspective

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

THANK YOU SIR

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

Kingdom, Pg. 5 , [available at: http://www.law.cf.ac.uk/research/pubs/repository/21] [viewed on: 25/06/2009]

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

Why Clinical Legal Education in India?

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

BENEFITS OF CLINICAL EDUCATION

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

TYPES OF LEGAL CLINICS

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

HISTORY OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

DEVELOPMENT OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA

GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

EARLY EFFORTS TO LINK LEGAL AID AND LEGAL EDUCATION REFORM

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

Dashed Expectations: Legal Educations Limited Response

REVIEWING CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective Synthesis Evaluation

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

History of Clinical education: An Indian and International perspective

Вам также может понравиться