"Legal education needs to be improved and the Bar Council of India needs to reform itself," Law Commission chairman and retired Supreme Court judge Balbir Singh Chauhan told the Economic Times in an exclusive interview.
Chauhan's statements have been published one day after the Supreme Court's damning obiter request in a judgment that the Law Commission should look into reform of legal education.
The bench of justices Anil R Dave, Kurian Joseph and Adarsh Kumar Goel had said:
There appears to be urgent need to review the provisions of the Advocates Act dealing with regulatory mechanism for the legal profession and other incidental issues, in consultation with all concerned.
Reacting to the judgment, Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra told the Hindustan Times: "We are going to file a review petition in the matter because the honourable court passed the order without giving us a hearing."
Mishra also told the HT that the verification drive to weed out 'fake' lawyers, would "bring out good results. But these aspects have not been looked into by the Supreme Court", while in respect of the lawyer protests in Tamil Nadu he said: "Everything was brought under control by the BCI but recent decision of the Madras high court to take penal action against lawyers has again aggravated the situation."
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Kian you should look into this and clarify. Why are you not covering such a major issue?
I know that in many NLUs a few alumni are roped in for a few lectures. This does not qualify as NLU faculty. What are the statistics of full time NLU-alumni teaching in the NLUs
www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/two-shots-at-one-seat/article8750082.ece
Is there any oversight or transparency of those seats?
I'm not blaming the kids themselves. Many of them are good and some do better than the CLAT kids. But its bizarre how a VC gets away with cheating the system like this. I'm ashamed to be an alumni from such an institution.
There is more to such stories. If you are interested, I will get back to you with more.
1. Blindly reproducing placement data and looking only at starting salaries at Amarchand. No coverage of other careers, people pursuing higher studies abroad etc
2. Gossip about X law school banning a fest or roast, Y law school imposing curfew, Z law school banning alcohol.
3. Shamnad Basheer killed a mosquito, Shamnad Basheer ate idlis for breakfast, Shamnad Basheer went to watch Sultan and demanded that he be sold a ticket at half price because of section 300(i)(a) of copyright act, will file a PIL.
4. Secret documents show Bimal Patel's grandfather's cousin's friend's wife's childhood friend's neighbour was a Pakistani spy. Yet, Patel continues to hold office.
Boss, it's time you focus on issues that matter namely:
1. Woeful state of faculty and lack of NLU alumni in academia.
2. Disconnect between job market and teaching
3. Shoddy infrastructure
4. Corruption (undeserving students entering through dodgy quotas, siphoning off grants etc)
5. Lack of jobs, yet NLUs being churned out
6. NLUD's unlawful refusal to join CLAT.
Agree in principle, those things are issues, but you'll find it's not a simple matter of us focusing on issues - most are bigger and more endemic.
One thing I feel that LI does which is more important than a lot of those micro issues you list, is focus on the lack of effective BCI oversight of the profession and of law schools, which has a knock on effect (and is arguably the cause of) a lot of these other things...
You might feel that some of the issues we report are trivial, but they are all form part of the picture and assessment you are able to make by creating transparency.
Would you know there's a lack of jobs if we didn't 'blindly reproduce' placement data. (Which we don't incidentally - there are several law schools' placements we haven't published yet since they provided us incomplete or fudged data, unlike other online publications)
Or that law schools are run like fiefdoms with arbitrary rules, banning fests, dresscodes, etc? Or that there's issues around diversity, if we didn't cover Shamnad Basheer's IDIA or the surveys they do?
Happy to dig out examples for each of the above and more.
We're nowhere near done yet, but I hope we are chipping away at these kinds of things, and no one else in the media seems to really be willing to help on that front either.
In response to your individual suggestions:
1. Is this something that anyone is not aware of? 'Islands of excellence' is almost a cliche at this point... Sure, we want to evaluate faculty quality and are working on the survey but it's not a quick fix or a matter of doing a story or two on them or quoting someone else who says the same thing.
2. You mean teaching doesn't pay enough?
3. Shoddy infrastructure is not news as such, it's a state of being - we can do one or 2 thoughtpieces or columns at most, bemoaning the terrible infrastructure at law schools, but do you think that'll make a difference? We have done a number of pieces on the funding and budgets of law schools, which is presumably part of the reason for poor infrastructure, since some states don't provide enough funding (while others like UP, for instance, pump a lot of money into RMLNLU so they have good infra).
4. Corruption etc - Agree would love to cover, that'd be quite a story but do you know anyone who's willing to talk on that rather than just hearsay? If you have more info, please get in touch confidentially but a lot of leads we chase up in that realm end up not being strong enough to publish unfortunately.
5. Lack of jobs: We have written about that plenty of times I think - can dig out articles if you don't believe... Again, it's not something anyone is unaware of though - it's a continuing state of affairs rather than news.
6. NLUD vs CLAT: We have written about or referred to that a bunch of times (unlike anyone else), but how often do you want us to flog that horse? If the courts don't take notice, no one files a petition and students are happily applying to NLU D anyway, I feel like we'd be running out of news angles.
But I agree with him about LI being capable of doing far more in this regard. Kian did try the faculty survey, but I guess it didn't meet with a lot of success. Why not try to get the course outline/curriculum of different subjects across NLUs? Surely that can provide some objective guideline of some sorts, given mostly the faculty members draft those themselves.
1. Students whistle and sing in class at top NLU to protest poor faculty.Lawctopus has not mentioned which NLU.
www.lawctopus.com/faculty-at-a-nlu-students-whistle-giggle-and-clap-can-we-do-anything/
2. Amity satellite campuses unrecognised. You should also investigate how the BCI gave Amity permission to start a law campus in Dubai. Shouldn't NLSIU have got it before anyone else? Is it because children of bigwigs like Jaitley and Rohatgi went to Amity?
www.lawctopus.com/amity-university-noidas-lucknow-campus-chandigarh-campus-and-global-business-schools-not-approved-by-ugc-reveals-rti/
There is a serious crisis and I hope Legally India covers it seriously and brings it to the attention of the two new law ministers.
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