The Legal Practitioners Act 1879

In one line

For eighty-two years this was the general law of the Indian legal profession: six grades of practitioner in one statute, admitted and disciplined by the courts, and it took the Advocates Act three separate commencements over fifty years to finish repealing it.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Legal Practitioners Act 1879, an Act to consolidate and amend the law relating to legal practitioners, dealt in eight chapters with advocates, vakils and attorneys of the High Courts and with pleaders, mukhtars and revenue-agents below them; it provided for their qualifications, certificates and enrolment, for their right to practise, for their remuneration, for their suspension and dismissal for conviction or unprofessional conduct, for penalties on unqualified persons who practised, and for the framing of lists of touts; and it was repealed in stages by the Legal Practitioners (Fees) Act 1926, the Repealing Act 1938, the Advocates Act 1961 and finally the Advocates (Amendment) Act 2023.

What the Act was for

Its long title is "An Act to consolidate and amend the law relating to Legal Practitioners", and the preamble says why: it was expedient to consolidate and amend that law in certain Provinces, and to empower the Provincial Government of every other Province to extend to it such portions of this Act as it might think fit. It received assent on 29 October 1879 and is Act No. 18 of 1879.

Two things follow from that preamble and both are worth an examination sentence.

It is a consolidating Act. By section 42 it repealed Chapter VI of Bombay Regulation II of 1827 and the two Acts the last chapter was about, Act I of 1846 and Act XX of 1853. The law of the profession outside the chartered High Courts, which had been scattered across Regulations and short Acts since 1793, was gathered into one statute.

It is not a national Act. It applied to certain Provinces and left every other Province's government to extend such parts of it as it thought fit, and it was afterwards extended, amended and applied piecemeal, Province by Province, by a long list of local Acts. A student who understands that understands why an all-India bar was still an aspiration in 1951: even the general law of the profession was not general.

The six grades

The Act's chapter headings give the structure of the profession, and the structure is the first thing to write in any answer about it.

Advocates and vakils were the pleading practitioners of a High Court, admitted under clause 9 of its letters patent or, for an unchartered High Court, under section 41 of this Act. Attorneys were the acting practitioners of the High Courts at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, officers of the court under the letters patent.