The Other Careers a Law Degree Builds
Chapter Three
Syllabus topic 1, "Objective of Legal Education"
Pages 9 to 12 of 543
In one line
Most of what a law degree is for happens outside a courtroom: it staffs legislatures and the drafting offices behind them, it staffs the administration and the regulators, it produces the teachers and researchers who reproduce the whole system, and it produces the far larger body of lawyers who advise, draft and negotiate and never argue a case.
In the wording a student can write in an exam: besides producing advocates and judges, legal education has the objectives of producing legislators, legislative draftsmen, administrators and regulators; of producing law teachers and legal researchers, without whom the system cannot reproduce itself or reform itself; and of producing lawyers for non-litigious and corporate practice, which is the destination of a large and growing proportion of graduates.
Why this is a separate objective and not a footnote
Because objectives determine curriculum. If the only objective were advocacy, a curriculum of substantive law plus procedure plus mooting would be defensible. The moment legislative drafting, regulation and transactional practice are objectives too, the omission of drafting, statutory interpretation, negotiation and accounting from a course becomes a defect.
Because it changes what a good college looks like. A college whose graduates all enrol at the Bar and a college whose graduates go into policy, compliance and academia are both succeeding, and a regulator that measures only the first will misjudge the second.
Producing legislators, administrators and policy makers
The historical evidence in India is unusually strong. The Constituent Assembly that framed the Constitution was dominated by lawyers, and the principal architects of the text were trained in law. That is not an accident of biography: drafting a constitution is a legal task, and the people capable of it were the people who had been taught law.
Legislation is drafted by lawyers. Every Act begins as a draft prepared in a legislative department by people trained to say exactly one thing and not another. Bad drafting is expensive, and it is corrected in litigation years later at the cost of the parties.
Regulation is administered by lawyers. Securities, competition, telecom, insolvency, data protection and environmental regulation are all done through statutory bodies applying statutory tests, and the officers who apply them need to be able to read a statute the way this course teaches.
And scrutiny is done by lawyers. A constitutional democracy needs somebody who can say authoritatively that a measure is beyond power. That capacity is created only by legal training, and it is exercised in litigation, in committee and in public argument.
Law teachers and researchers
This is the objective that makes the others possible, and it is the one this book's reader is closest to. Nobody but a law teacher produces a lawyer, and nobody but a legal researcher produces the material a law teacher teaches from.
The Other Careers a Law Degree Builds
The LL.M. is the qualification for it. The reader is taking a master's degree whose Semester IV is a dissertation and an interdisciplinary project, which is the training this paper's Modules III and IV give. Chapter 120 takes the point up in full.
Research is also what makes reform possible. The Law Commission of India cannot recommend a change without knowing how the present rule is working, and finding that out is research. Module II returns to this at chapter 740.
And the objective is not being met. The 184th Report of the Law Commission, December 2002, is largely a description of a system that could not reliably staff its own law colleges, and the shortage of full time, qualified law teachers is the most frequently repeated finding in every report on Indian legal education.
Non-litigious and corporate practice
A large part of legal work is done to prevent litigation, not to conduct it. Advising on a proposed transaction, drafting so that a dispute cannot arise, structuring an agreement, conducting due diligence, negotiating, complying with a regulator and settling are all legal work, and none of them is advocacy.
The skills are different and are examinable. Drafting, conveyancing, negotiation and conciliation are the content of the compulsory clinical papers 21 and 23 under Schedule II of the Rules of Legal Education 2008, taught at chapter 500. That the Bar Council put them in the compulsory core is itself an answer to a question about objectives.
In house work is now an ordinary destination. A company's legal department, a bank's compliance function, a regulator's legal cell and a firm's transactional practice all employ law graduates who will rarely appear in a court.
And so is work that is not called law at all. Journalism, civil services, public policy, human rights work, mediation and academic administration all take law graduates, and the training transfers because what transfers is the ability to read a rule, find a fact and construct an argument.
A worked example
Consider a single LL.B. class of a hundred at an MU affiliated college.
A group enrols and litigates. They are the objective chapter 20 described, and section 24 of the Advocates Act is their route.
A second group enrols and never litigates. They join firms and companies as transactional lawyers. Their day is drafting, diligence and negotiation, and the clinical papers were the only part of the course that touched their work.
A third group sits competitive examinations. Some enter the judicial service, some the civil services, some a regulator. Their legal education is doing the work chapter 20 described for the Bench and this chapter describes for the administration.
The Other Careers a Law Degree Builds
A fourth group goes to an LL.M. Some of them will teach, and the ones who do will determine what the next hundred are taught. This book's reader is in that group.
A fifth group leaves law altogether, and takes with it the habit of reading a document carefully, which is a public good even when it is not a legal career.
Now ask the examiner's question. Which of those five groups did the college's syllabus, methods and examinations serve? In most Indian law colleges the honest answer is the first, and that mismatch between the objectives and the delivery is the argument of the whole of Module I.
What this does NOT mean
It does not mean the profession is unimportant. The Bar remains the largest single destination and the one the statute regulates.
It does not mean law schools should become management schools. The objective is that the legal training should be good enough to transfer, not that it should be diluted into something general.
And it does not license a college to drop the practical papers because its students go into corporate work. Drafting and negotiation are more central to transactional practice than to litigation, not less.
Quick revision
Beyond the Bar and the Bench, legal education has three further objectives: legislators, draftsmen, administrators and regulators; law teachers and researchers; and lawyers for non-litigious and corporate practice.
The Indian evidence for the first is the composition of the Constituent Assembly and the fact that legislation, regulation and scrutiny are all done by people trained in law.
The second is self-reproducing: no law teachers means no lawyers, and the 184th Report's most repeated finding is the shortage of qualified full time law teachers.
The third is recognised in the curriculum: Schedule II's compulsory clinical papers 21 and 23 are drafting and conveyancing, and alternative dispute resolution.
The test of a college is whether its methods and examinations serve all its graduates' destinations or only the first.
Test yourself
1. Give three objectives of legal education other than producing advocates and judges. Producing legislators, legislative draftsmen and administrators; producing law teachers and researchers; and producing lawyers for non-litigious and transactional practice.
2. Why does the objective of producing law teachers matter more than its numbers suggest? Because it is the objective on which the others depend. Law teachers produce every other kind of law graduate, and legal researchers produce the material on which teaching and law reform both rest.
3. Point to something in the Rules of Legal Education 2008 that recognises non-litigious practice as an objective. Schedule II makes Drafting, Pleading and Conveyance and Alternative Dispute Resolution two of the four compulsory clinical papers, numbers 21 and 23, so the compulsory core already includes work that is not advocacy.
The Other Careers a Law Degree Builds
4. A candidate answers a question on the objectives of legal education entirely in terms of the courtroom. What is the weakness? It describes the destination of only a part of the graduate body, and it cannot then explain why the compulsory curriculum contains drafting, conveyancing and alternative dispute resolution, or why legal education is regulated in the public interest for the sake of legislation and administration too.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.