The Bar Council of India (BCI) has quietly but significantly changed the All India Bar Exam (AIBE) syllabus since last time, possibly making it quite a bit harder, wrote iPleaders co-founder Abhyuday Aggarwal on Live Law yesterday.
Full disclosure: iPleaders is a some time advertiser on Legally India, and Legally India had started the bar exam preparation service Barhacker with Aggarwal in 2009.
AIBE X will have four new subjects, while four subjects have been dropped from the syllabus.
The BCI has added to the AIBE syllabus:
- public interest litigation,
- taxation,
- intellectual property, and
- the Land Acquisition Act 1894.
Deleted from the syllabus are:
- corporate social responsibility,
- jurisprudence, and
- the Limitation Act 1963.
While the new syllabus is available online on the AIBE’s official website, the syllabus up to the AIBE IX does not appear to have been online.
Aggarwal had writen in his post on Live Law:
We noticed that the syllabus for the All India Bar Examination has been changed, relatively quietly. There is no new notification on the website for the exam but those who click on the syllabus link on the homepage and go through the syllabus carefully will notice that there is some difference.
We are not clear exactly when this change took place, owing to absence of a formal notification. Further, on first glance you would not notice a change, since the total number of subjects stays the same at 19, so if you visited the site earlier and took down the old subjects, you might not notice there’s a change until you go through each subject.
We don’t want there to be any chances of you missing it, hence we are writing about the new syllabus.
We spoke to a candidate for the upcoming AIBE, who confirmed that he only found out yesterday that the syllabus had been changed, as the BCI had not explicitly informed registered candidates of the change.
The BCI has been rather opaque in conducting this edition of the exam on other fronts too: it secretly hiked the exam registration fees significantly and had re-appointed controversial bar exam contractor ITES Horizon in a dubious manner.
Then again, the BCI’s opacity has been a bit of a way of life for the legal profession in India generally, as our reportage on the topic the past few years suggests.
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While we are concerned about BCI and its affairs as India lawyers, clearly, the BCI is not the ONLY thing we care about. Looks like all you care about now is settling scores with BCI and all other items of interest have taken a back seat. LI has become a weekly magazine (news items are spaced 3-4 days) and you cover a fraction of the news that your competitors are covering. I am afraid but LI is gradually fading away. I hope you and your team will wake up and smell the coffee.
Rgds
Loyal reader
I've been working on reorienting LI strategically to ensure it continues being sustainable, since the legal news landscape has changed a fair bit in the last year or two.
In my analysis, the majority of our readers are on the in-house/law firm side, and students and we want to increasingly cater to them, as well as cover stories that no one else is doing on BCI transparency, legal education and other important issues affecting the entire profession.
That doesn't mean we will stop doing litigation stories, but we will be doing fewer of those and only do them where we can actually add value. Jumping into the court reporting fray, which we had experimented with for a year or two, has not really worked out editorially (and in terms of reader interest) and that side is being catered to quite well by the MSM, and sites like Bar & Bench and LiveLaw, which have invested heavily in that space.
We've also been working on a print and digital guide to Indian and global laws, from an Indian perspective, which has been taking a fair bit of time but should hopefully be out soon.
And we should be ready to launch our revamped deals coverage shortly.
In the meantime, I appreciate you taking the time out to share your views, and please do let me know what you think or would like LI to do going forward.
No authoritative coverage on liberalisation and interviews with eminent experts.
No systematic coverage of BCI scams, especially in legal education.
No systematic coverage of corruption and other problems in law schools, only occasional stories every few months and then forgotten without any follow up.
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