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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

16/02/24 22:31 PM IST

An intervention that will help strengthen legal education

In News
  • The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law, and Justice recently submitted a significant report on legal education, making several path-breaking recommendations to strengthen the quality of legal education in India.
A new regulator
  • A key recommendation of the committee is to limit the powers of the Bar Council of India (BCI) to regulate legal education.
  • The BCI’s role in regulating legal education that pertains to acquiring basic eligibility to practise in the courts is indispensable.
  • However, several other facets of legal education, especially at the post-graduation level, do not pertain to litigation.
  • The committee recommends, and rightly so, that regulating these parts of legal education should be entrusted to an independent body called the National Council for Legal Education and Research (NCLER).
  • This proposed body will develop qualitative benchmarks to regulate legal education.
  • Eminent legal academicians who deposed before the parliamentary committee batted for the creation of the NCLER.
  • In addition to judges and practising lawyers, the NCLER should have eminent law professors with an unimpeachable track record of research and serving legal education.
Concerns
  • The leadership positions in our university’s law faculties and law schools should be held by passionate, charismatic, and visionary academicians who inspire and create an enabling and supportive environment that allows younger academicians to realise their potential as outstanding teachers and brilliant researchers.
  • Sadly, barring a few notable exceptions, the deans of law faculties and vice-chancellors of law universities in India have failed to provide professional leadership.
  • These flawed academic leaders detest talented professors and are the biggest bottleneck in striving for excellence.
  • No amount of money or perks can overcome such a primary institutional deficiency.
  • Second, to boost the culture of legal research in our law schools, there should be complete academic freedom and autonomy.
  • As Jawaharlal Nehru said, “a university stands for humanism, for tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas and for the search of truth”.
  • A law school or any other academic institution can accomplish this goal only if academicians are free to offer their well-researched views without any fear, even if these views are at variance with popularly held beliefs in society or contest the dominant ideas of the time.
Source- The Hindu

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