LLM Foundation Course Legal Education and Research Methodology 2018 Question Paper with Solutions

The ancient period trained interpreters of dharma rather than lawyers. The sources of obligation were the Vedas, the Smritis, particularly the Manusmriti, Yajnavalkya and Narada, the commentaries and digests, and custom. Legal learning was part of a general education in the gurukula and the parishad, and the specialist was the person learned in the sastras who advised the king's court. There was no profession of advocacy in the modern sense and therefore no professional training. What did exist, and is worth saying because it is often left out, is a highly developed jurisprudence of procedure and evidence, set out in the Smritis and in Kautilya's Arthashastra, which describes the constitution of courts, the classification of disputes and the law of proof.

The medieval period placed a different textual system alongside it. Under the Sultanate and the Mughals the administration of justice in matters governed by Islamic law rested on the Quran, the Sunnah, ijma and qiyas, and the officers were the qazi, advised by the mufti who gave the fatwa. Legal learning was again theological and textual, acquired in the madrasa. Hindu law continued to be administered by pandits within the community. Neither system produced a secular institution teaching law to a general body of students.

The post independence period is the period of diagnosis. The Fourteenth Report of the Law Commission of India (1958) on Reform of Judicial Administration examined legal education and described it in severe terms, criticising the part time evening college, the absence of full time teachers and libraries, and the production of graduates who had never seen a court. The Advocates Act, 1961 unified the profession and, by section 7(1)(h), gave the Bar Council of India the function of promoting legal education and laying down standards in consultation with the universities. The Indian Law Institute had been founded in 1956 to build a research culture. The legal aid committees, Krishna Iyer (1973) and Bhagwati (1977), tied legal education to the delivery of justice, and Article 39A was inserted by the Constitution (Forty second Amendment) Act, 1976.

The second limb of the question asks whether today's system fulfils the basic objectives, and the honest answer is that it does so very unevenly.

It fulfils them in the national law universities and a small number of older institutions. There the intake is competitive, the faculty is full time, the library is real, the moot court and the clinic function, and the graduates enter litigation, chambers, firms, the judiciary and the academy. That is the professional objective met, and the instrumental and academic objectives partly met.

It does not fulfil them in the affiliated colleges where most law students study. There the lecture is the only method, the four practical papers are taught and examined as theory, the legal aid clinic is a notice board, the internship diary is signed without the internship, and the library subscribes to no database. A graduate of such a college has the same degree and not the same education.

V. Sudeer v. Bar Council of India, (1999) 3 SCC 176. The Bar Council of India framed the Training Rules, 1995, requiring a law graduate to serve a year of pre-enrolment training and pass an examination before enrolment. The Supreme Court struck the Rules down, holding that section 24(1) of the Advocates Act, 1961 sets out an exhaustive list of qualifications for enrolment, that section 24(3) contains the only savings Parliament enacted, and that the rule-making power in section 49(1)(ah) does not permit a new disqualification at the threshold. The Council's diagnosis, that the degree did not produce a practitioner, was never doubted; only its power was.

Bar Council of India v. Bonnie Foi Law College, 2023 SCC OnLine SC 130, decided 10 February 2023. A Constitution Bench of five judges overruled V. Sudeer, holding that the Council may prescribe an examination for entry, that its placement before or after enrolment is for the Council, and that the All India Bar Examination is valid. The Court also suggested that final year students be allowed to sit it.

The evaluative force of that pair is the answer to the second limb. A system that fulfilled the professional objective would not need an examination at the door, and the regulator has now spent twenty eight years insisting that it does.

Prof. Yashpal v. State of Chhattisgarh, (2005) 5 SCC 420. A State enactment permitted private universities to be established by notification, and more than a hundred were created, many with no campus, no faculty and no infrastructure. The Supreme Court struck the Act down, holding that a university cannot be brought into existence by a mere notification without any provision for infrastructure or academic standards, and that the University Grants Commission Act, 1956 confers on the Commission the responsibility of coordinating and determining standards, which a State law cannot bypass. For legal education the decision matters twice over: it establishes that the power to create an institution is not the power to create a degree, and it is the clearest judicial statement that standards are a national and not a local question.

Bar Council of India v. Board of Management, Dayanand College of Law, (2007) 2 SCC 202, fixes the same boundary from the other side. The Court upheld the Bar Council's insistence on the prescribed qualification for the Principal of a law college, holding that the Council's function of promoting legal education and laying down standards under section 7(1)(h) of the Advocates Act, 1961 extends to the conditions in which a recognised degree is taught, and is not confined to the syllabus.

Conclusion. Indian legal education moved from a textual and sastric learning that produced advisers rather than advocates, through a colonial system deliberately designed to produce pleaders cheaply, to a post independence system that diagnosed its own failings repeatedly before finally acting on them in 1987. The reform worked where it was tried. It has not reached the ordinary affiliated college, and so the answer to the second limb is that the system fulfils the basic objectives for a minority of its students and issues the same degree to the rest. Reform directed at the point of entry to the profession, of which the All India Bar Examination is the current example, raises the barrier without improving the teaching, and until the resourcing of the ordinary college changes the gap will remain.