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Legal Education and Research in India: The Changes and the Challenges

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Contemporary Issues in International Law

Abstract

The evolution of the legal profession in the context of globalization presents a very exciting research frontier and opens newer opportunities for legal education and research institutions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Priya Vinjamuri, “Strategic Management and Implementation of Legal Education in India, A Perspective”, NLUDLRS, 2012, at 64; 1 NLUD, 2012, Access to Legal Information and Research in Digital Age, at 110, “The Indian legal education and research is one of the prominent streams where transformations occur and multiple forms of domestic social capital are acquired, exchanged, and converted into other forms of capital that can be deployed on the global stage. As Indian corporate lawyers pursue their roles as architects of globalization, they are becoming a part of the new legal elites that form, sustain and propagate their conceptions of law. Developments in India’s corporate legal sector, together with developments in other emerging economies will have implications for the domestic and global rule of law and will also affect the way lawyers conceptualize, teach and practice law in the US and other advanced economies”.

  2. 2.

    C.R. Kumar, Global Legal Education in India: Opportunities and Challenges (Halsbury’s Law, 2009) at 13; See also John Flood, “Legal Education, Globalisation and the New Imperialism”, in Fiona Cownie (ed.), The Law SchoolGlobal Issues, Local Questions (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., UK 1999); Donald B King, “Globalization Thinking for Modern Legal Education”, in Donald B. King (ed.), Legal Education for the 21st Century (Fred B Rothman & Co., 1999).

  3. 3.

    K. Jayasurya, “The Rule of Law in the Era of Globalization: Globalization, Law and the Transformation of Sovereignty, The Emergence of Global Regulatory Governance”, 6(2) Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 1999, pp. 425–456.

  4. 4.

    The importance of understanding law in a critical and reflective manner is a concomitant necessity due to the ideological nature and function of law. Granfield explained that the corpus of “[law] is a loose collection of propositions that constitute and reify ideas about such principles as rights, authority, obligations, and justice. Law then is ideological, and to study law … is to engage in a course of study in ideology.” To be exposed to ideology in this manner without knowing that one is being exposed to ideology, without knowing what ideology is and what it does would be indoctrination and would be inconsistent with any academic, liberal arts, or civic conception of legal education. Timothy J Berard, “The Relevance of the Social Sciences for Legal Education”, available at: www.ler.edu.au/vol.%2019%20RTFs/berard.rtf [accessed on April 18, 2013].

  5. 5.

    Roger Brownsword, “Law Schools for Lawyers, Citizens, and People”, in Fiona Cownie (ed), The Law SchoolGlobal Issues, Local Questions, 1999, pp. 27–30, 36–38; “Globalization is already molding the legal landscape in emerging economies and blurring the boundaries between global and local. Global law firms spread their operations through corporate groups to expand to fast-growing markets, and local firms are altering their structures and products to globalize—although the extent to which these firms truly conform to global standards remains an open question”.

  6. 6.

    S. Randeria, “The State of Globalization: Legal Plurality, Overlapping Sovereignties and Ambiguous Alliances Between Civil Society and the Cunning State in India”, 24(1) Theory, Culture & Society, 2007, pp. 1–33; See also M.C. Regan, Jr. and P.T. Heenan, “Supply Chains and Porous Boundaries: the Disaggregation of Legal Services”, 78(5) Fordham Law Review, 2010, pp. 2137–2191.

  7. 7.

    “Trade in Legal Services”, a Consultation Paper on Legal Services under GATS in preparation for the ongoing services negotiations at the WTO, Department of Commerce, Trade Policy Division Government of India, 2006, available at: http://commerce.nic.in/trade/consultation-paper-legal-services-GATS.pdf, [accessed on April 1, 2013].

  8. 8.

    C. Davis and S. Bermeo, “Who files? Developing Country Participation in GATT/WTO Adjudication”, 71(3) The Journal of Politics, 2009, pp. 1033–1049.

  9. 9.

    India being a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been working toward removing the barriers to trade in legal services and has enforcement powers that could potentially limit the scope of national policy. See for instance Roy Stuckey, “Preparing Students to Practice Law: A Global Problem in Need of Global Solutions”, 43 South Texas Law Review, 2002, at 649.

  10. 10.

    Veerappa Moily, “Indian Legal System”, New Legal Review, 2010; “The legal profession must rise to the new opportunities that come about as a result of India moving to take her rightful place among the leading nation’s of the world. India deserves to be a leader in the global legal industry—this is our faith, our belief and vision.”

  11. 11.

    R. Agarwal and S. Nisa, “Knowledge Process Outsourcing: India’s Emergence as a Global Leader”, 5(1) Asian Social Science, 2009, pp. 82–92.

  12. 12.

    N. Ahmad, “Adapting Indian Legal Education to the Demands of a Globalizing World”, 10(7) German Law Journal, 2009, pp. 847–858.

  13. 13.

    Priya Vinjamuri, supra note 1, A Perspective—Creation of a good and effective legal suggestion system and implementation of the key areas that are highlighted to promote and improve in their services induce the confidence and boost the morale of the legal fraternity. Unprejudiced implementation of ideas and security for the position and financial stability are the key areas which need emphasis in the Indian legal system as these are very sensitive and challenging aspects the mar the systematic and effective functioning of the legal system. Effective and quality human resource management is another application aspect of effective quality legal management.

  14. 14.

    Available at: www.adb.org/Documents/Books/Strengthening.Justice./chap05.pd [accessed on April 1, 2013].

  15. 15.

    “The polarization of the debate and the need to reform regulation to protect indigenous industry are major barriers to moving forward. In the long term, however, India will have difficulty sustaining its position on foreign lawyers because of both the internal politics of the profession and external political pressure.” With respect to the external political dynamics, India as a signatory of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is under pressure to engage in the progressive removal of trade barriers and to liberalize services markets generally. The fact that the Indian government maintains a generally pro-free-trade attitude further highlights the difficulties of legal protectionism (Government of India, 2006). As India develops a greater stake in, and dependence on, other legal markets (either through the expansion of Indian law firms or through outsourcing) and demands that other countries pursue liberalization in sectors related to India’s interest, it will necessarily become more vulnerable to foreign influence and more willing to open its legal market. As this debate plays out, Indian lawyers are immersed in another globalization process where boundaries are even less clear: the globalization of knowledge.

  16. 16.

    Though in a recent Madras High Court case, the petitioner explicitly challenged the mode of entry of foreign lawyers in India, alleging that they were operating out of five-star hotels and violating taxation and immigration laws a charge, which the challenged foreign law firms vehemently deny.

  17. 17.

    Mihaela Papa and David B. Wilkins, “Globalization, Lawyers, and India: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis of Globalization Studies and the Sociology of the Legal Profession”, 18 International Journal of the Legal Profession 2012, at 7; It is by now common knowledge that globalization is transforming virtually every sector of the world’s economy and the transformation has important implications for the rapidly globalizing market for legal services. At the same time, as economic power shifts, India, China and other emerging economies are becoming central players in this market. While scholars studying the legal profession have been increasingly interested in the globalization of the profession in general, there has been little debate about the effects of various globalization processes—economic and non-economic—on the Indian legal profession, and recent scholarly attention to legal developments in India has largely focused on legal process outsourcing and foreign law firm entry.

  18. 18.

    Globalization of governance presents two major challenges to the legal education. The first challenge is to understand who regulates the legal education and also the profession; and ensure appropriate mechanism. Second, as international institutions and global governance become more relevant and India transforms into a world power, the country has to have lawyers those can lead and defend its rise and shape the global legal order the way India sees fit.

  19. 19.

    Ibid, So far the much needed support for the regulation of legal education has not commenced, though the legal system is likely to be affected by these developments. India’s ambitions in other areas of global governance have increased, creating a demand for legal capacity building and strategizing to redesign global institutions. As globalization progresses, the regulatory performance of both Indian and global institutions will be tied to efforts to make those involved in governance more accountable.

  20. 20.

    N.R. Madhava Menon, “A Transformation of Indian Legal Education”, A Blue Paper, Harvard Law School, Program on the Legal Profession, 2012, the expansion of law colleges continued during this period, enrolling annually about 200,000 students in the over 900 law teaching institutions in the country. Quality remained a casualty in many of these institutions which included university departments of law (roughly 150), Government managed/funded colleges of law (about 150) and the rest privately sponsored self-financing mostly part-time (evening) institutions.

  21. 21.

    Although the Limited Liability Partnership Act, 2008 began to address some constraints and removed the restriction on the number of partners, significant challenges remains. For example, Indian law firms are still prohibited from maintaining a web site or distributing brochures that describes the firm’s areas of practice and personnel. Needless to say, it is far from clear how much these remaining regulatory restrictions would actually impede the ability of Indian firms to compete with potential foreign competitors. From the standpoint of economic globalization, however, the important point is that the fate of these domestic regulatory restrictions has now become a part of a broader debate over the way that the Indian legal profession will respond both normatively and structurally to the pressures of the global market place.

  22. 22.

    A strong domestic public interest constituency and infrastructure is crucial for the evolution of social movements that use law to address globalization’s document. India has been a focal point for such globalization battles, which significantly contributed to the global public policy discourse on development and had repercussions far beyond the domestic sphere. A potent example is a multi-level public interest advocacy effort against massive World Bank funded developmental projects and related land acquisitions in river projects, power plants etcetera is yet to evolve.

  23. 23.

    The characteristic of traditional legal education concerns what is taught. Traditional legal education is almost entirely concerned with the transmission of content knowledge and, more particularly, with teaching legal rules, especially those drawn from case law. According to Dicey, nothing “can be taught to students of greater value, either intellectually or for the purposes of legal practice, than the habit of looking on the law as a series of rules.” The main teaching resource, aside from didactic lectures, is textbooks and case books. These books are commonly written in treatise style, and do not engage the reader in any activity aside from reading. Often texts are marketed as being as suitable for practitioners as they are for students, and this is so even for some subjects commonly taught in the first year of the law degree. This suggests not only a close connection between legal education and legal practice, but also that there is no appreciation of the students’ intellectual development as they progress through their degree. Legal rules are taught in year or semester long subjects, based on nineteenth century categorisations of law and without any consideration of their theoretical, historical, political, or economic foundations. Subjects are treated as discrete and having little direct interaction. Students are taught the same type of material a detailed analysis of common law rules and given the same type of assessment examinations testing mastery of the legal rules and their application to hypothetical problems semester after semester, in much the same way, focusing often exclusively on learning legal rules from listening to an expert describing them, or reading a text which focuses on legal rules. The only thing which changes between subjects and between semesters in the student’s progression through the degree is the substantive rules which form the content of the subjects. See also R.J. Scragg, “Law, Skills and Transactions: The Opportunity for an Expanded Curriculum”, New Zealand Law Journal, 1995 at 234.

  24. 24.

    In continuum to the problems of litigations, the law statements, documents and the very language of law and court orders provide a contagious territory for breeding enriched arguments on either side.

  25. 25.

    Supra note 23.

  26. 26.

    They (the students at law schools) learn—how not to attend the classes,—how to manage high ranking marks,—how to exploit the impoverished institution and abuse on lines of anomaly of the system,—how to bully around and discount law in every thing that follows in life.

  27. 27.

    For those traditional university educational administrations, legal education is after all—one of the five faculties of disciplines mandatory to attain the seal of approval from University Grants Commission; an unavoidable necessity rather than a component in educational integration. Statistics will certainly reflect that the educational administrators do not want to get marred with the horrific scenario of law schools under their administration. No traditional university authority in India is ever interested in running legal education program within the prevailing model of university system; given the option, probably all the universities in India would remove the “law schools” from their sphere of educational administration.

  28. 28.

    It may be summed up as—whatever the wisdom in legal scholarship the Nation exhibited has been the individual choice and endeavor of the learned lawyer or a judge or a law teacher despite the fact that the state has failed in its responsibility for legal education.

  29. 29.

    R. Dhavan, “Means, Motives and Opportunities: Reflecting on Legal Research in India”, 50(6) The Modern Law Review, 1987, pp. 725–749.

  30. 30.

    S. Gupta, History of Legal Education, (Deep & Deep Publications Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, 2006); The Bar Council proposed to change this system by phasing out 3-year LLBs (making the 5-year LLB degree the norm and allowing three-year programs only if they focus on specialized areas of law), introducing benchmarking of law colleges, standardizing the academic calendar, creating a new national curriculum and improving teaching and continuing education.

  31. 31.

    Legally India, July 13, 2010; There are three negative consequences of the teacher-focused nature of traditional legal education. The first is that it leads governments and universities to believe that legal education is inexpensive to provide. Second, students are treated amorphously and as though they are homogenous. Given that law teachers were traditionally predominantly middle class men, third consequence of the teacher focus is that students’ experience of learning is not taken seriously. The assumption is that if the teacher teaches, then the students will learn: if they do not do so successfully, it is the students’ fault. Consistently with this, student learning is not properly evaluated. Evaluation, if it is undertaken at all, is likely to be used in a purely pragmatic sense by both teacher and law school, in which the teacher’s overall satisfaction or popularity rating is used for various purposes and any other feedback received from students is discarded.” Indeed, the former head of the Bar Council recently proposed slashing the number of Indian law schools by more than 80%, from 913 to 175.

  32. 32.

    In context of Australian Law School it has been analyzed as follow: Mary Keyes and Richard Johnstone, “Changing Legal Education: Rhetoric, Reality, and Prospects for the Future”, 26(4) Sydney Law Review, 2004, at 537, “they conclude with some key challenges facing tertiary legal educators. The first challenge is for Australian law schools to rethink their relationship with the legal profession, to ensure that law schools assert their autonomy in matters of curriculum, teaching and learning and research, so that legal education aims for more than preparing students for work in private legal practice. A second challenge is to take a collective, law school-wide, approach to integrate matters such as legal theory, interdisciplinary, ethics, general and legal skills, and issues of internationalization, gender and indigeneity, so that law students are provided with a coordinated and incremental approach to developing knowledge, skills and attitudes. Third, law schools need collectively to engage with educational theory to develop approaches to structured and activity-based teaching, and to cooperative and collaborative learning in law schools. Finally, the evaluation of teaching and of subjects needs to be rescued from its current use predominantly as a management instrument, and to be used instead by law teachers to understand, reflect upon, and respond to the ways in which students experience law subjects and law teaching”.

  33. 33.

    There are as many as 15 National Law Universities across the country as on date. The basic premise of most arguments for multi- and inter-disciplinary legal studies (and by extension the relevance of such studies for legal education) is quite simply that legal phenomena and studies of legal phenomena are so various that they necessarily belie the artificial boundaries of established academic disciplines. Moreover, legal phenomena seem to be increasingly various and complex. With the rise of, for example, paralegal professions, competition between law firms and consulting firms for traditional legal work, increasing business interest in multidisciplinary practice, and the increasing interest of law students in joint degrees, legal phenomena are arguably becoming inter-vocational as well as interdisciplinary. The discipline of law has never been up to the task of understanding law in all its facets, and this is becoming increasingly true and increasingly clear as distinctions between law, other vocations, professions and social systems become increasingly contested and confusing. While interdisciplinary scholarship has flourished and its relevance to legal education has not gone unnoticed, the incorporation of interdisciplinary teaching and learning into legal education has certainly not kept pace.

  34. 34.

    Available at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/career-law-advocacy-skills-national-law-school-of-india-university/1/166227.html “To some extent, this change in perception can be credited to the rising influence of the National Law Universities (NLU’s), widely acknowledged as the leading institutions of legal learning in the country today. In the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the NLU’s are, “a small number of dynamic and outstanding law schools” in the country, which “remain islands of excellence amidst a sea of institutionalised mediocrity.”

  35. 35.

    Stuckey Roy, Best Practices for Legal Education: A Vision and a Road Map (the Clinical Legal Education Association, United States, 2007) at 2.

  36. 36.

    Michael Geist, “Where Can You Go Today? The Computerization of Legal Education from Workbooks to the Web”, 11 Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 1997, at 141; Andrew Smith, Peter Ling and Doug Hill, “Adoption of Multiple Modes of Delivery in Australian Universities”, 3(2) Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 2006, pp. 67–68.

  37. 37.

    Supra note 34, “Last year, approximately 24,000 candidates appeared for the CLAT exam, of which only 1200 or so were selected for admission to the various NLUs.”.

  38. 38.

    Duxbury makes a complementary point, that the law and society movement has made impressive and important contributions in showing “how the operation of law is very different from what one would expect were one only to study the law itself,” but he also expresses regret that the contributions of law and society scholarship have been undervalued in traditional legal scholarship.

  39. 39.

    M. Galanter, “New Patterns of Legal Services in India”, in R. Dhavan and M. Galanter (eds), Law and Society in Modern India (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1989); M. Galanter and L. Krishnan, “Debased Informalism: Lok Adalats and Legal Rights in Modern India”, in E. Jensen and T. Heller (eds), Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2003).

  40. 40.

    B. Fischer, “Outsourcing Legal Services In Sourcing Ethical Issues: An Examination of the Ethical Considerations Arising from the Practice of Outsourcing”, 16 Southwestern Journal of International Law, 2010 at 454.

  41. 41.

    To be sure, even if these hiring trends persist, the fact that the NLUs graduate only a tiny fraction of the total number of Indian lawyers will mean that it will take a very long time for the Indian corporate sector to approach the overall size of the “personal plight” (to use Heinz and Lauman’s original evocative phrase) sector of the Indian bar where most Indian law graduates continue to be employed. But even if the overall size of the corporate sector remains relatively small in relation to the Indian bar as a whole, the pattern of elite replication suggested by these placement patterns from the NLUs is still significant. The fact that similar placement patterns in the US have persisted since at least the 1920s notwithstanding concerted efforts by legal reformers to encourage American law students to pursue public interest careers, illustrates the difficulties of changing this dynamic; see Supra note 17, at 15.

  42. 42.

    Shamnad Basheer, supra note 34, December 28, 2011, “Little wonder then that many of the leading NLU’s have near perfect placement statistics and their graduates earn some of the highest entry level salaries, competing with the best from the IIT’s and IIM’s. Top graduates from the top NLU’s can earn as much as Rs. 15 lakh per annum soon after graduation.” See also M. Owen, “Legal Outsourcing to India: The Demise of New Lawyers and Junior Associates”, 21(2) Pacific McGeorge Global Business and Development Law Journal, 2008, pp. 175–190.

  43. 43.

    D. Held and A.G. McGrew (eds.), Globalization Theory: Approaches and Controversies (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007).

  44. 44.

    Gaye Lansdell, “The Flexible Learning Paradigm: Have We Forsaken Quality and Professionalism for Technological Convenience in the Training of Lawyers in the 21st Century?”, in Angela T. Ragusa (ed), Interaction in Communication Technologies and Virtual Learning Environments: Human Factors, Information Science Reference, 2010.

  45. 45.

    C. Krishnamurthy, “Legal Education and Legal Profession in India”, 36(2) International Journal of Legal Information, 2008, pp. 245–257.

  46. 46.

    The motivating factor—“excellence in legal education” need be reminded from time to time, yet the learning process need be nurtured with joy and ecstasy of time. The students need be cultured to realize the satisfaction of sacrifices made in studying law lies in contributing to the legal resources of the new world. It is an overwhelming task. Most of the law schools could inculcate the “feel good” in the learning process. There has been divergence, most of the students learn more from their peers and mimic seniors and fail in their creative learning process. They learn shortcuts and mess their learning time with other deviations. Many of the students undergo a stress not being able to cope up with the law school environment. Counseling of the appropriate students also needs to be part of education system.

  47. 47.

    Vivienne Brand, “Decline in the Reform of Law Teaching? The Impact of Policy Reforms in Tertiary Education”, Legal Education Review, 109, 1999, pp. 139–140; Mary Keyes and Richard Johnstone, “Changing Legal Education: Rhetoric, Reality and Prospects for the Future”, 26(4) Sydney Law Review, 2004, pp. 537–538; The Monash PDLP ceased in 2009 due, in part, to these factors. Prior to this in 2007 the Law School also withdrew its Skills, Ethics and Research courses (SERs), removing key vocational elements from the curriculum. See for instance M. Sako, “Global Strategies in the Legal Services Marketplace: Institutional Impacts on Value Chain Dynamics”, 2009, available at: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/professionalservices/Documents/SAKO.pdf [accessed on April 27, 2013].

  48. 48.

    Mark Blaxill & Ralph Eckardt, “The Invisible Edge: Taking your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property”, Portfolio, March 2009; Strengthening the legal education-strategies—“The simulation courses of legal education such as legal research and writing, appellate advocacy, interviewing and counseling, negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, trial advocacy should be taught with the lawyering skills of problem solving, legal analysis and reasoning, legal research, factual investigation, oral and written communication skills, client counseling, negotiation, litigation and ADR procedures, organization and management of legal work, and recognizing and resolving ethical dilemmas. Lot of home work coupled with sufficient financial allocation need be done to augment the position to an uniform homogenous system”.

  49. 49.

    “The breadth of the idea of fundamental legal research illustrates the point about overlapping categories. Legal research today may be thought to be considerably broader than the tripartite classification of the Pearce Report, as it embraces empirical research (resonating with the social sciences), historical research (resonating with the humanities), comparative research (permeating all categories), research into the institutions and processes of the law, and interdisciplinary research (especially, though by no means exclusively, research into law and society). The T. Shanahan, “Legal Scholarship in Ontario’s English-Speaking Common Law Schools”, 21(2) Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 2006, at 36. Pearce Report did not really capture these extended elements of legal research, yet in some ways they are not so much new categories as new or newly emphasized perspectives or methodologies. They highlight law as an intellectual endeavor rather than as a professional pursuit, though the latter is undoubtedly enriched by the former.

  50. 50.

    The students need be exposed to newer place of learning with a newer environment every year. The teachers and the students need to have complete faith on the system and their respective role play. The students need to spend quite some time in association with learned advocates, bureaucrats, legislators, judges and with all such other ports of learning. The course and the class room exercises need be done with defined goals and evaluated accordingly. The course work need be scientifically designed by the teacher in consultation with the faculty improvement trainers.—See generally G.W. Russel, “The New Legal Architects”, India Business Law Journal, 2010, available at: http://www.indialaw.com/pdfs/Top%20foreign%20law%20firms.pdf [accessed on April 1, 2013].

  51. 51.

    Examination schemes need be creative, imaginative and self evaluating. Examination strain need be done away by making the evaluation model continuous and perennial. One is examined at every time and evaluated accordingly. In other words there is nothing to be so serious about examination, for “examination at all times is no examination.”

  52. 52.

    The suggested objects of the Australian Academy of Law according to the proposal developed by Professor David Barker, Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney are: to promote excellence in and encourage the advancement of legal practice in Australia; to promote collegiality among members of the judiciary, legal profession and law teachers; to promote excellence in legal research and the publication of contributions to legal knowledge; to promote the professional development of members of the legal profession; to promote views relating to legal reform to the Government, community and other professions; and to promote high standards of ethical conduct within the legal profession.

  53. 53.

    Robert Lloyd, “Investigating a New Way to Teach Law: A Computer-Based Commercial Law Course”, 50(4) Journal of Legal Education, 2000, pp. 587–590; which discusses the costs in terms of workload for staff using discussion boards.

  54. 54.

    John Biggs, “Teaching for Better Learning”, 2(2) Legal Education Review, 1989–1990, pp. 133, 144; See also S. Nathanson, “Developing Problem-Solving Skills”, 44 Journal of Professional Legal Education, 1994, at 215, the divergence in subjects like taxation, environment, human rights, criminal justice administration, banking, corporate administration, governance, personal law, arbitration & mediation and international law (both private and public) all have to go hand in hand. The teachers need to produce their respective courses with newer designs, newer goals, and newer methods of teaching every succeeding year.

  55. 55.

    L.B. Snyder, “Teaching Students How to Practice Law: A Simulation Course in Pre-Trial Practice”, 45 Journal of Legal Education, 1995, at 513 See also Rob Nadolski and Jurgen Woretshofer, “The Use of ICT in the Training of Legal Skills”, 39 Law Teacher, 2005, at 29; Note—“May be the teachers are allowed to avail academic holiday of three–six months every alternate year to update by attending refresher courses/ associate with other relevant interdisciplinary institutions and give newer orientation for the year that follows. May be the teacher be allowed to visit other similar institutions and work as an adjunct faculty with two or more institutions.” See also Jeremy Webber, “Legal Research, the Law Schools and the Profession”, 26(4) Sydney Law Review, 2004, at 565, the different aspects of strategic quality management that need to be thoroughly understood and applied to create an effectively efficient quality legal educational management system which include financial strategy, basic business strategy, research strategy, and most importantly a wage system based on ability. A quality feedback system with a creation of an understanding and awareness of the overall direction of the legal organization in particular and the legal system in specific, as there is nothing general about a law functionary, and the importance of reinvesting the profits of knowledge and finance to promote further growth and technological advancement is crucial to the growth of a technologically savvy legal knowledge system.

  56. 56.

    A. Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004); See also J. Schukoske, “Meaningful Exchange: Collaboration among Clinicians and Law Teachers in India and the United States” in L. Trublek and J. Cooper (eds), Educating For Justice Around the World: Legal Education, Legal Practice, and the Community (Ashgate Publishing, Dartmouth, 1999).

  57. 57.

    “The ten highest scoring characteristics (out of a possible 65) were: (1) Knowledge of substantive law; (2) A professional attitude to the practice of law; (3) An ability to identify legal issues raised by a fact situation; (4) A commitment to timely communications with his/her client; (5) Knowledge of legal practice and procedure; (6) An ability to give clients practical advice; (7) Knowledge of professional or ethical standards; (8) A commitment to staying up to date with the law and legal practice generally; (9) Concern/care for well-being of clients; (10) Being diligent or persevering in his/her work.”

  58. 58.

    A. Sechooler, “Globalization, Inequality, and the Legal Services Industry”, 15(3) International Journal of the Legal Profession, 2008, pp. 231–248; see also D.B. Wilkins, “Some Realism about Legal Realism for Lawyers: Assessing the Role of Context in Legal Ethics”, in L. Levin and L. Mather (eds) Lawyers in Practice: Ethical Decision Making in Context (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2012).

  59. 59.

    D.M. Katz, J.R. Gubler, J. Zelner, M.J. Bommarito, E.A. Provins and E.M. Ingall, “Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate”, 61(1) Journal of Legal Education, 2011 pp. 1–28.

  60. 60.

    D. Subbnarsimha, “Retrieving Indian Law: Colonial Erasures, Postcolonial Pedagogies”, in M. John and S. Kakarala, En-culturing Law: New Agendas for Legal Pedagogy (Tulike Books, New Delhi, 2007); See also Contrast Harry T. Edwards, “The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession”, 91 Mich LR, 1992, at 36; by awareness of total non-legal environment, it is meant that the first-class lawyer’s ability to comprehend the non-legal environment of the problem at hand, to evaluate the impact that non-legal considerations will have upon the outcome, and to perceive the ways in which the knowledge and insight of non-lawyers can be mobilized and brought to bear. Every legal problem arises in its own unique setting of economic and political considerations, historical and psychological forces; each legal situation raises its own problems of data accumulation, ordering, and weighting.

  61. 61.

    Jack Goldring, Charles Sampford and Ralph Simmonds (eds), New Foundations in Legal Education (Routledge-Cavendish, 1998); Greater synthesis of globalization studies and the sociology of the legal profession would produce benefits for both fields. Scholars and practitioners have vigorously debated the advantages and disadvantages of globalization in different areas of study. The globalization of the legal profession represents a new frontier for globalization scholars, and acts as a test case for applying the lessons learned over the past decades. As such, it would benefit from a greater integration into the mainstream globalization literature and policy debates. Indian debates on market opening, shaping legal education or reforming “Regulatory frameworks illustrates that concerns about globalization’s discontents are much alive, and that there is an ongoing search for innovative solutions. Insights from the sociology of the legal profession can help globalization scholars set the stage for more vigorous and nuanced empirical studies on the globalizing Indian legal profession. The results of these studies would in turn shed important light on the tension between the economic opportunities created by globalization and questions of equality, inclusion, and the rule of law studied by socio-legal scholars, Wilkins, supra note 58.

  62. 62.

    David Spencer and Samantha Hardy, “Deal or No Deal: Teaching On-Line Negotiation to Law Students”, 8(1) QUTLJJ, 2008, pp. 93,100.

  63. 63.

    John Zerelli, “Reflections on Legal Education and Philosophy: The Critical Role of Theory in Practice”, Legal Education Review, 2007, pp. 103; 107, the combination of the two is important as it allows for a stringent analytical and substantive understanding of the subject area of law.

  64. 64.

    Therefore, a good clinical teaching of law does far more than wed knowledge of legal doctrine and legal analysis with common sense. Though expensive, the live client clinics owing to their simulation focus may be considered as an alternative to seminars, moot courts and law reviews and may be considered as an add-on to the main course of substantive legal education Development of multi-year strategies for clinical implementation of the live-clinics of substantive law, negotiation subjects, which is a key to litigation and the practice of law, should be implemented so as to promote a live dealing of the legal procedure during the course of study.

  65. 65.

    Karl Mackie, “Lawyers’ Skills: Educational Skills” in Neil Gold, Karl Mackie and William Twining (eds) Learning Lawyers’ Skills (Commonwealth Legal Education Association, 1989) pp. 9–18; Bobette Wolski, “Why, How and What to Practice: Integrating Skills Teaching and Learning in the Undergraduate Law Curriculum”, Journal of Legal Education, 2000, at 287; Sharon Christensen and Sally Kift, “Graduate Attributes and Legal Skills: Integration or Disintegration”, 11 Legal Education Review, 2000 at 207; Note: The simulation courses of legal education such as legal research and writing, appellate advocacy, interviewing and counseling, negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, trial advocacy should be taught with the lawyering skills of problem solving, legal analysis and reasoning, legal research, factual investigation, oral and written communication skills, client counseling, negotiation, litigation and ADR procedures, organization and management of legal work, and recognizing and resolving ethical dilemmas. The coalitions with law schools in India formalizing the need for simulation clinics as a part of the legal curriculum, integrated approach to the learning and application of law and legal studies is important to facilitate a thorough understanding of the need for a change in the strategy in the implementation of legal education.

  66. 66.

    Herbert L. Packer and Thomas Ehrlich, New Directions in Legal Education (McGraw Hill, New York, 1972); Packer and Ehrlich suggest that a proper study of law focuses the student’s attention on the conception of a legal system; who operates in it, how they function, what impact they have, how the system changes, the impact the system has on other elements in our society, and vice versa. Here the effort is to give the student an idea of law as a social process, the functions it performs, the institutions involved, and how change takes place. It gives at least an introductory idea of the structures and processes involved in society’s efforts to shape and organize individual and group behavior a view of law as an ordering process a study of law opens up questions of how social ends and means interact and reveals the complications involved in attempting to create or recreate the ongoing, working institutions of a society. Theory and practice meet and interact. Values, ends, means, information, and theory all intersect. Such a study of law is not so much another discipline as an education in the relation of specific social problems to various sources of knowledge and modes of thought. See also Roger Burridge and Julian Webb, “The Values of Common Law Education: Rethinking Rules, Responsibilities, Relationships and Roles in Law Schools”, 10(1) Legal Ethics, 2007, pp. 72, 74 and 75.

  67. 67.

    Wilkins, supra note 58, for example, argues that recent curricular innovations in legal education are still insufficient to close the gap between legal education and legal practice. Wilkins calls for: systematic and rigorous quantitative and qualitative research about the profession’s institutions, organizations, norms, and practices, and how each of these “arenas of professionalism” is evolving and should evolve to confront the demands of an increasingly globalized market for legal services. This research, in turn, should form the basis for a whole new kind of pedagogy. At its core, this pedagogy should emphasize how organizational structures, norms, and practices shape individual careers and influence the practical meaning of substantive legal rules and professional commitments. Wilkins implies that law schools do relatively little to prepare their students for legal careers, but even less do they help law students understand “the large-scale economic, social and cultural forces that are reshaping the profession their students are about to enter;” See also Jack R. Goetz, “Interactivity Remains the Key to Successful Online Learning”, 2009, available at: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/lessons/lesnov00.htm [accessed on April 1, 2013].

  68. 68.

    He insisted that the production and dissemination of knowledge is always an expression of power, and that the expression of power always involves the production and dissemination of knowledge. Foucault described how discourses designate the conjunction of power and knowledge: it is through discourses that the production of knowledge takes place and through which power is exercised and power relations are maintained. Discourses seek both to inform and influence, both to educate and dominate. They tell subjects about themselves and about the world, and also construct that world and determine its subjects. It is power–knowledge, in the form of discourse, that determines what is allowed to be said and thought within a discipline, and “who can speak, and when, with what authority.” Each legal education discourse, then, is simultaneously a category of statements about the teaching of law and an expression of power within the law school seeking to achieve a range of objectives, including the normalization of a particular approach to the teaching of law, the enhancement of the status of a particular type of legal scholar and the establishment of a regime of truth. The six discourses compete with each other to dominate the discursive field of Australian legal education, deploying a range of strategies including the propagation of particular constructions of “critique.” See also Roger Cotterrell, “Why Must Legal Ideas be Interpreted Sociologically?”, 25 Journal of Law and Society, 1998, at 171; David Nelken, “Blinding Insights? The Limits of a Reflexive Sociology of Law”, Journal of Law and Society, 1998, at 407; the notion of “legal culture” may be one solution to this challenge, David Nelken, “Using the Concept of Legal Culture”, 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy, 2004, at 1; Jeremy Webber, “Culture, Legal Culture, and Legal Reasoning: A Comment on Nelken”, 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy, 2004, at 27.

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Panda, B.P., Panda, M. (2018). Legal Education and Research in India: The Changes and the Challenges. In: Nirmal, B., Singh, R. (eds) Contemporary Issues in International Law. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6277-3_38

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