Specialised Legal Education: Bar Council Compliance?

As some of you may be aware, a generous bequest by US billionaire Vinod Gupta helped kickstart the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property law (RGSOIPL), India's first specialised law school, focusing on intellectual property law (IP). This school, which is based out of IIT-Kharagpur has been operational since 2006 and has strong ties to the George Washington University law school, one of the top IP law schools from the US.

Although this law school does not only teach IP, but a string of other legal courses normally taught at the other law schools, it restricts admissions to candidates with a first degree in science. In pertinent part, the IIT-K website notes:

"The School presently has one programme: Six-Semester, Three-Year Full-Time residential LL.B. Programme leading to the Degree of Bachelor of Law with specialization in Intellectual Property Rights, at par with the LL.B. Degree requirements of the Bar Council of India."

Just as this novel experiment in specialised legal education produced its first set of law graduates this year, it has been hit with a legal challenge. Express Buzz reports:

"The Supreme Court has issued notices to the Bar Council of India, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and to the Secretary, Ministry of Human Resource Development on a writ petition questioning the propriety and correctness of the Bar Council of India in giving permission to IIT, Kharagpur to start a course in LLB in Intellectual Property Rights.

A Bench comprising Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan, Justice P Sathasivam and Justice Deepak Verma directed issuance of notice after briefly hearing advocate Sanjay Parekh.

The petition filed by M Chandrasekhar, an advocate of the apex court, pointed out that the eligibility for joining an LLB course is a graduation in any discipline, that is BA, B. Com, BSc etc.
The petitioner pointed out that LLB is an entry-level professional course in law wherein a candidate is taught basic principles of law in a number of subjects. If any candidate desires to specialise, he can opt for LLM course in a subject of his choice like Constitutional Law and Contracts.

But, for the first time, the general character of the LLB course is sought to be changed by IIT Kharagpur by starting a specialised course in Intellectual Property Rights and that too restricting admission only to BE, B Tech, MBBS, M Pharma, MSc, MBA with Science/Engineering background, the petitioner averred."

Towards Specialised Law Schools?

Given the sheer dearth of skilled patent lawyers in this country, I am very partial to the idea of a specialised IP law school. Particularly since the premier legal institutes in the form of the National law schools do not focus on science at all, a discipline that is absolutely essential for churning out decent patent lawyers. The National Law University (NLU), Jodhpur does offer a B.Sc. LLB, but I am not entirely sure if the level of the science taught as part of the BSc is adequate. The head of the IP Division of a big Indian pharma company once confided to me that these candidates were of no use to them, as the science taught was fairly elementary.

NUJS offers a very curious BA/BSC LLB degree, but there is no science taught at all. Dr Madhav Menon, the founding director of this law school may have intended for this law school to provide a science option as well, but this never really kicked off. The nomenclature seems more of a historic relic now.

Anyway, back to the dispute at hand and legal challenge mounted against the grant of approval to RGSOIPL's 3 year LLB course. I don't necessarily see a problem with a specialised "IP" focus in an entry level LLB course, provided other foundational legal courses such as contracts, torts, criminal law, constitutional law etc are also taught. I'll try and bring you a more detailed note on the specific legal issues once I lay my hands on the petition.

In the meantime, let me try and highlight some of the broader issues raised by this recent controversy:

i) To what extent do law schools comply with the Bar Council of India (BCI) norms?

ii) Should the BCI (in its current form) be permitted to regulate legal education at all? Does it have the institutional competence to do so?

Compliance With Bar Council Rules?

To answer the first question, a couple of months back, I checked the Bar Council of India (BCI) requirements applicable to the five year integrated law degrees (BA LLB, BSc LLB etc) and found that none of the law schools were likely to comply with the fairly onerous requirements spelt out by the BCI.

In particular, given that these schools accord rather step motherly treatment to the BA component (having a mere 5-6 courses of history, economics and political science), they are likely to fall foul of the BCI mandate that the BA or BSc syllabus "has to be comparable to the syllabus prescribed by leading Universities in India in three year bachelor degree program in BA, B.Sc, B.Com, BBA etc taking into account the standard prescribed by the UGC/AICTE and any other respective authority for any stream of education".

The BCI norms appear to require a good 14-20 courses to cover the "BA" component--which is way beyond the current 5-6 course offerings in this regard by the law schools.

Institutional Competence of the BCI?

As for the second question, most academics abhor the thought of having legal education in India solely dictated by the BCI, most of whose decision makers are practitioners with no real insights into legal education policy. And this sentiment has been echoed by the National Knowledge Commission as well, which recommended that course curriculum etc be designed by a new standing committee on legal education under a proposed Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education.

Arun's paper titled "The Waning of a Magnificent Obsession: An Abridged Story of the History of Legal Educational Reform in India" (which I referred to in an earlier post) has some fascinating insights into this issue. He discusses the Gajendragadkar Committee Report of 1964 in this regard and notes:

"The Committee had noted the distinction made under the Advocates Act, 1961 according to which, theoretical or scientific legal education would be in charge of the Faculties of Law working under the different Universities in India and the practical or technical legal education would be in charge of the State Bar Councils.

To remedy the situation, the Committee had recommended that the Bar Councils and the Universities should act in concert and agree upon evolving suitable criteria for both theoretical and practical forms of education. However, the Committee felt that a more substantive and long term solution to the problem would be the creation of a statutory body called the Council of Legal Education which could be given supervisory control over all aspects – theoretical, practical and incidental – of legal education in the country. The Gajendragadkar Committee was of the opinion that the Council should be constituted on a high-power basis and be composed of judges, law teachers, members of the Bar, and representatives of industry or other fields which would have an interest in law. The Committee did not elaborate on the details of the constitution of the Council or on its powers, but felt that the constitution of such a Council by Parliament would facilitate the progress of legal education along healthy lines.

Similar suggestions have, over the years, been made by several persons who have had some experience with policy making in the field of legal education, and recent fiascos like the V.Sudeer case only serve to heighten the urgency of the requirement of such a unified authority."

Krishnaswamy on the National Law Universities

This op-ed by Sudhir Krishnaswamy (now a professor at NUJS) appeared in the Indian Express this weekend discussing the recent student strike at HNLU - a topic of a recent post on this blog. The article raised two points (among others) which from my vantage point I think bare reemphasizing -

(1) Get the bar councils out of the business of regulating legal education. The mandates bar councils impose in some states seem absurd, or at least poorly thought out. When LUMS in Lahore set up their law school (which I think may be the best run I've seen in South Asia) one of the first things they pushed for was to get the bar council to judge their students on a bar exam. This way the school had much more control over classes, how they monitored attendance, graded, etc. It wasn't there was no accountability or no input from the bar, but there wasn't such dominating influence in how a legal education had to be structured.

(2) It's the quality of the students who have made the National Law Universities and given them their reputation more than anything else. It's not the faculty that really draws students to these institutions now, but rather the promise they will be around other bright students and so a good reputation will attach with the degree when they graduate. As Sudhir hints in his piece this may mean Indian legal education is in for some instability the next few years. If other competitors move in like Jindal Global Law School that promise a higher level of faculty you can see top students moving to that institution or those like it. This sort of movement is likely healthy, but also creates confusion. Prospective students will start second-guessing what the "it" school is - what's on its way down, what's a passing fad, what will be considered the top tier schools in five years when they enter the job market, etc. This is not new to Indian legal education, but is likely to be amplified given current circumstances making it more difficult for prospective students to be confident in their choices.

HNLU in trouble?

An article ('Its own course') in the current issue of Outlook discusses the present situation at the Hidayatullah National Law University (HNLU), Raipur where the student community is on an indefinite strike calling for the resignation of the Vice-Chancellor Prof. (Dr.) M.K. Srivastava. According to a website which has been set up - http://www.revivehnlu.com/ - the Vice-Chancellor has issued an indefinite shutdown of the University, and electricity and water has been cut to the hostels. I am not aware of any further developments. The HNLU situation is certainly a serious one, and at a time when law schools seem to mushrooming all over the country (for instance, the recent National Law University, Delhi and the upcoming Jindal Global Law School, Haryana), this may be a timely reminder that we need to not only build new institutions but also to sustain them.

The NUJS Law Review: another step towards reviving strong legal scholarship in India

The new National Law Schools have often – and justifiably – been criticized for their failure to develop a strong scholarly and research tradition and a corresponding body of scholarship on Indian law. The reasons for this failure are quite complicated, and are the subject of considerable debate. One measure of scholarly contributions is the existence of a quality journal. Two decades after the establishment of the first National Law School in Bangalore, there is no single journal within the country which can justifiably claim that it matches the heights reached by the Journal of the Indian Law Institute in its first two decades (even that esteemed journal has since been unable to consistently keep up with that level of quality in recent years).

The good news, however, is that most of the new schools now acknowledge this lacuna, and are taking steps to address it. One such measure is the renewed focus on student edited journals, and the determined efforts of their editorial boards to raise the profile of their publications by soliciting high-quality pieces from lawyers and academics within India and abroad. Simultaneously, the journals also provide a vehicle for well-researched pieces by current students, thereby paving the way for a future generation of homegrown academics. Significantly, a number of these journals have chosen to digitize their issues, and have also made efforts to provide free online access to archived issues. The trend was initially started by journals at the National Law School, Bangalore (the National Law School of India Review, the Socio-Legal Review and the Indian Journal of Law and Technology) and has been followed by NALSAR Hyderabad (the Indian Journal of Constitutional Law and the Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law).

This post seeks to highlight the emergence of the NUJS Law Review, which has joined the trend noted above. Although only three issues old, it is quickly moving towards the achievement of its founding objectives of becoming a “medium of expression and preservation of legal research” while simultaneously serving as “an important component of legal education, training and skills learning for the students of NUJS.” The archives section of the dedicated website of the journal (perhaps a first for a student-run journal, although the IJCL has a tie-up with the commercial database Indlaw that allows it to have a separate section on an existing website) now features the full contents of the first three issues of the journal.

Each of the three issues features stimulating articles on topical issues by some leading foreign (usually German) and domestic scholars, while also containing shorter comments and notes by NUJS students. The subjects canvassed so far include : international criminal law, EU integration, , IP law, WTO law, telecommunications law, election law and a host of other topics. The book review section of each issue covers significant books on Indian law that have been published recently. Many of these articles make for interesting reading. Given my own interests, I found articles by Professors Goerlich (providing a German constitutional analysis of the death penalty) and MP Singh (which is probably one of the early published analyses of the Ashoka Kumar Thakur case) particularly stimulating.

What is most heartening about the journal is that the quality of its student-authored contributions appears to be steadily improving. The third issue in particular presents the work of a team of students, who call themselves ‘the basis structure research group’ and have authored a set of six articles focusing on various aspects of the Kesavananda ruling. Even as I have only begun to make my way through these articles, I am struck by the intellectual ambition and rigour of the analysis on display. As explained in the joint foreword by the authors, the project appears to be the result of a two-year study, and the final papers offer many provocative leads on a subject which may well be the single most analysed issue within Indian constitutional law scholarship.

The NUJS Law Review is somewhat unique in having chosen to be a quarterly. Given that more established journals have had trouble in bringing out even one annual issue in recent times, this fact is itself an indication of the ambitious nature of the project. If the fare that has been on offer so far is anything to go by, we may well have good reasons to closely watch out for succeeding issues.

Guest Post: Indian Kanoon - The road so far and the road ahead

The following guest post is from Sushant Sinha - a student at the University of Michigan and the force behind the searchable legal databases website Indian Kanoon. Our blog has previously debated issues of free digital accessibility of legal information (here, here, here and here). Indian Kanoon is an important step in that direction. (We realise that some of the technical details in the post may be unfamiliar to our readers, but the broad themes have been discussed regularly on our blog.)

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I was quite pleased to find law information publicly available on the judis and the indiacode. However, it was too difficult to look for anything on these websites and so I started building tool sets to play with law data. At a certain point I felt that integration of these small software pieces will be very interesting. I was still skeptic as to whether search on law documents meant anything to common people who do not know the law jargon. In any case I integrated the tool sets into a search engine and got pleasantly surprised when many of my common queries were well answered. So I deployed it as a publicly available service, called it Indian Kanoon and fortunately many people have found it useful over time. When actual people start using a service (whether free or fee-based), the demand for correctness and usability increases significantly. The need to understand the problems, think about the issues and fix them have kept me in tight grip. Indian Kanoon was announced last January in a very crude form and a number of changes have gone in the past year. So this post is mostly to highlight what all work has gone into indian kanoon in the last year, what the challenges were and what features are planned in future.

Integrating more legal documents Indian Kanoon started only with supreme court judgments and central laws. Clearly this was not sufficient to many people who wanted to search in high court judgments, law commission reports and law journals. Over last year, a number of other legal documents have been added. Firstly, the law commission reports and a law journal was added. The law journal "Central India Law Quarterly" has been digitized and was put up on Internet by Devaranjan. The only problem in their integration was that the many of these documents were images scanned from the books. So I used tesseract, a free OCR software supported by google, for extracting text from these images. However, the text extraction quality was just 90% and I am skeptical if google uses tesseract for its own google books project. Tarunabh pointed out the availability of constituent assembly debates that can be integrated. He pointed out two main problems in integrating them. First, the article numbers in the debates were different than in the constitution. Secondly, debates are cited in the court judgments using page numbers in the official books. But both of these numbers were not available in the digital copy provided by the government. So the only way out was to go back to the actual books. We did not want to give away the digital route yet. So we went to books.google.com that had a scanned copy of the debates. Tarunabh emailed Google to release those books in public domain as the copyright on them has expired the previous year. Google replied saying that they are not sure about the copyright expiration and will be conservative in making books publicly available. Finally, I loaned the books from a library, manually copied the page numbers and the association list between the article numbers in the debates and the article numbers in the Constitution and integrated the constituent assembly debates. Indian Kanoon was highly deficient in terms of high court judgments and even in Supreme court judgments as Dilip earlier pointed out on my blog. So I integrated the high court judgments and made Indian Kanoon more comprehensive.

Features Beside making Indian Kanoon comprehensive in terms of legal documents, a number of features to make searching easier have been added. The most common problem was the mis-spelling of Indian names and so I first added the most critical feature for spelling suggestions. Ability to search and order documents by date was added next. The search and forums were redesigned to look aesthetically appealing. In order to provide notifications for new judgments, RSS feed for court judgments was recently added. Finally, people may like to monitor documents related to certain words or phrases. So on Tarunabh's suggestion I added the RSS feed for any arbitrary query.

Contributing code back Developing indian kanoon software has been possible because of the availability of large amount of free software. As a result I was able to modify these software and customize it for law search. Indian Kanoon uses a feature rich open source database - Postgresql as the backend. When users submit a query, matching documents are found, ordered and the top few are shown. For each document, the search engine also displays a small text excerpt where the query terms appear. The text excerpt allows people to quickly evaluate whether the document is relevant to the query. The headline function developed for indian kanoon was contributed back to postgres and has been added to the postgres CVS head. Beside that a bug in postgres was fixed as well. I also sent the phrase search function to the postgres list. But, Teodor Sigaev, who merged OpenFTS in the Postgresql, wants a generic operator that can check for arbitrary distance between the lexemes. I have not yet got time to work on this operator. Beside development on the database, the Indian Kanoon forums has been released as djangobb - Django Bulletin board that uses the django web application framework. The judis recently moved to a really obfuscated website where the judgment did not have a stable URL. Prashant Iyengar pointed out that we are not getting the live feed from the judis. So I reverse engineered the website and released the judis reverse engineering code.

Future works Even after so much of work a number of things need to be improved on indian kanoon. Here is a list of changes that I think are required to make indian kanoon more comprehensive, more rich and better in search. Please feel free to suggest more.

1. Reverse engineering different court and tribunal websites so that indian kanoon can provide a live feed of all Indian court and tribunal judgments.

2. Currently indian kanoon cannot answer questions like "list of judgments in which a particular law section was held" and "search only in family law judgments". The problem is that we do not have enough semantic information about judgments. So I want to enable common users to start tagging documents. There will be two kinds of tagging: categorizing court judgments and laws into broad categories like family law, constitutional law, right to equality etc and secondly, tag whether a judgment explains, bolsters, or overturns a given law or judgment. The tags generated by the users will be available to everyone with the Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike license 3.0.

3. A number of people type in natural language in the search box. For example, someone will type "recent judgments from delhi high court". Even though we can answer these questions, we directly search the query to the documents. For example, the above query could have been reduced to "doctypes: delhi sortby: mostrecent". So what we need is a small natural language processor that can automatically convert such natural language queries to a more precise query that the engine can evaluate.

4. I only support searching for a set of words in the documents. Roy wanted a more sophisticated query langauge that supports boolean queries. This will enable people to issue more complicated queries like (freedom OR speech) AND (NOT expression).

5. With the addition of more data over time, Indian Kanoon takes more than a second to evaluate some queries. A number of software changes (or possible hardware upgrade) are required to bring back the evaluation time to sub-second.

Indian Legal Academia: Evolution of Phase 3?

I recently joined the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata, ranked as one of the top five law schools in India (along with NLS (Bangalore), Nalsar (Hyderabad), NLIU (Bhopal) and NLU (Jodhpur)).

Many friends and well wishers were rather surprised that I opted to stake out a career at an Indian law school. As opposed to pursuing a career abroad, thought to be far more promising, both in terms of scholarship generation and financial remuneration.

This post attempts to respond to their concerns as to why it might make sense to teach at an Indian law school in this day and age. I try to make out the case that legal academia in India is slowly entering its "third" phase--a phase that is (or will soon be) characterised by a focus on legal scholarship, research and original legal thought. This is not to say that teaching will not be as important—but that the nature and quality of teaching will respond in many ways to this emphasis on scholarship.

The hope is that this (non enforceable) promise of an enlightened phase 3 might incentivise young legal scholars from around the world to give Indian legal academia some serious thought.

Although this post will touch upon general aspects of Indian legal education, its key thrust will be on “legal academia”. For the sake of convenience, I broadly define this term here to mean the “environment and community concerned with the pursuit of research, scholarship and education”.

A bit of history first that will help explain Phases 1 and 2 and set the tone for Phase 3.

Phase 1


For a great many decades after India’s independence, the quality of legal academia was deplorable (and one might argue that this remains the case even today, albeit with some progress). Faculty were often third rate and their commitment to the cause of legal education left much to be desired.

Many law professors played truant (more so than students), choosing to spend time engaged with financially lucrative activities, such as appearing before courts (which prompted the Bar Council to pass rules prohibiting law professors from practicing law) and even moonlighting as real estate agents! This utter callousness cannot be divorced from the ills that plagued legal education in general. Notably, law professors were paid a pittance leaving them little incentive to perform, library resources and general infrastructure were often lacking, and students were completely disinterested in classes.

A memorandum prepared as far back as the 1950’s by a leading legal academic, R.U. Singh (Dean of the Lucknow Law Faculty) highlights some of these problems: irregular timings of classes; low attendance rates by students who faced little if any disciplinary action for missing classes; poor testing methods by instructors; inadequate library facilities; outdated curricula; and second-rate instructors who were paid below average salaries (referenced from Jayanth Krishnan’s excellent article on legal education in India and the American influence (or non influence), which is available for download on SSRN).

Not too surprisingly, the quality of legal education and the calibre of lawyers that entered the profession was pathetic. What was perhaps most striking was the fact that the number of law students that entered the profession was but a tiny fraction of the total number of students churned out by these law schools.

Little wonder then that the system was not geared towards either attracting the best talent for teaching or in ensuring that those that joined had some incentive in teaching to create high quality lawyers.

The licensing of several sub standard law schools by the Bar Council (in their bid to de-brahminise the legal profession by having several students from a myriad of castes and backgrounds enter law schools from far flung areas) contributed to this problem of oversupply of third rate lawyers in the country. Net result: a number of us that wished to join the National law school, Bangalore within the first few years of its functioning faced severe opposition from our parents and well wishers, to whom law was but a poor third choice (after must sought after degrees in engineering and medicine).

Indian lawyers will no doubt, be pleasantly surprised at the respect and adulation accorded to lawyers in Japan. Bengoshis (the Japanese term for lawyers) are a truly venerated lot—given that only 1-3% qualify the bar exam and become lawyers. Naturally, the man on the Tokyo omnibus assumes that an Indian lawyer must have undergone a similarly rigorous experience. Little do they know that the number of law schools and law students in India outnumber theirs by a factor of a hundred or even upwards. And more importantly, that we are spared the agony of bar exams and are entitled to enrol immediately upon our final exam results being declared!

Anyway, I digress. The point of the build up above was to set the stage for the entry of a dynamic law professor, Dr Madhav Menon, who first mooted the idea for a national law school in a bid to raise the quality of legal education in India. This widely hailed "national law school" experiment in 1987 ushered in Phase 2 of Indian legal education, a phase characterised predominantly by allegedly new pedagogic techniques and the development of a cadre of law students that came to be internationally reputed. But unfortunately, it also resulted in a faculty that, burdened with a high teaching and administrative load, produced next to no scholarship.

Although I started out intending this to be a single blog post, my ramblings have now forced me to split up the post into 3 parts. I am therefore constrained to deal with Phases 2 and 3 in later posts. I hope readers will bear with me.

ps: Arun Thiruvnegendam, in a well researched article documenting the evolution of legal education in India notes that “those who have ventured to write the history of legal educational reform tend to make generalizations about the trends witnessed in this process.”

Given word limitations and the nature of blog posts, I have to plead guilty to this charge of “generalizing”. Much as I would love to, space constraints do not permit me to pay homage to academic pioneers such as Dean Anandjee, Prof RU Singh and Prof Upendra Baxi who existed in phases 1 and 2 --phases that were otherwise characterised by the lack of scholarship and original thought. I will attempt to do justice to their contributions another day.

Unfortunately, Arun, being the perfectionist that he is, refuses to publish this piece (titled "The Waning of a Magnificent Obsession: An Abridged Story of the History of Legal Educational Reform in India") at this stage. Since I will be quoting from his insightful piece in the follow up posts, I have to communicate his caveat (to me) to all readers: “I wrote it during my NLS LL.M days and it documents the story of the creation of NLS and some of the debates about legal education in India. However, a lot of my views about the way NLS and other places should be reformed have changed quite drastically.”

pps: Jay Krishnan’s article rightly notes that the idea for "national law schools" first came out of the Gajendragadkar Committee report in the 1960’s. (Report of the Committee on the Reorganisation of Legal Education in the University of Delhi, 1964 (The University of Delhi, Delhi : 1964).

Digitising Legal Scholarship - II

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on the sorry state of digital archives of legal scholarship in India. Since then, I have had many responses on archives and searches that do exist at the moment, and several initiatives being taken in this direction. This post is to summarize these responses and acknowledge these initiatives.

Shamnaad has already introduced Sushant in a previous post. Sushant has made Supreme Court cases searchable in a user-friendly fashion that should put some of the subscription sites to shame. Indian Kanoon, his search engine promises to include High Court decisions, Constituent Assembly Debates, Law Commission Reports and journal articles in its database very soon.

The other person I want to introduce is Devranjan, a third year student at National Law School, Bangalore. Along with some other students, he has founded the 'Open Book Society'. Their purpose is to digitize and make searchable archives of important Indian Journals. They have already managed to do this for the Central India Law Quarterly and the National Law School of India Review. They need prior permission from journals to digitize them. As I understand it, they put in all the effort into doing so themselves - the Journals just have to agree. This is a fantastic initiative and deserves all praise and help. This is the message he asked me to pass on:

'Would u be able to help the society in any way for instance
raising money, getting journals, or just giving us
better visibility?'

If anyone wants to get in touch with Devranjan, please let me know and I will put you in touch with him.

Here is the list of freely available articles, indices and search options that I found out in the last two weeks. Only some of this is really good quality, but hopefully the other established journals like the Journal of Indian Law Institute, Indian Journal of International Law, the journal section of Supreme Court Cases, Cochin University Law Review, Indian Bar Review and other journals published by various law schools will learn from the Central India Law Quarterly and let Devranjan's team digitize their archives.

Freely accessible online articles:
Central India Law Quarterly
National Law School of India Review
Indian Journal of International Law (only table of contents is archived)
Scholasticus - Journal of National Law University (only table of contents is archived)
National Law Institute University WebJournal
The Practical Lawyer
Lawyers' Collective Magazine (only current issue is online - I could not locate the archives)
Combat Law
Manupatra Articles
IndLaw Articles
Legal Services India Articles

Free search engines:
Indian Kanoon
NLSIU Journal Index

Please let me know if I have missed out anything and I will
update these lists.

Digitising legal scholarship

Is anyone aware of any searchable online database of Indian law journals? I searched for the websites of Journal of Indian Law Institute and Indian Bar Review (well, the former had more like a webpage than a website, and a google search on the latter shows up Bar Council of India Rules for the first hit!). I looked up the journal pages of prominent law schools (those that had one) - no academic content whatsoever. Even subscription research websites like Manupatra do not have anything more than primary legal material. The only useful, but limited, research tool is OPAC - a freely available searchable index of most Indian legal journals created by the National Law School Library.

As a student at NLS about 4 years ago, I made feeble attempts to get the law school journals freely available on its website. In any case, the journals did not generate revenue and putting them up online could only increase readership, besides making useful contribution to scholarship. Nothing came of it.

Then Lawrence (of the Liang fame) came up with Lex Libre - its webpage describes it as "An Open Archive of Student projects/articles/ working papers contributed to the public domain". With eight papers on the site, most of which were put up at its inception, I don't think it went very far (although I continue to get publication requests for my embarrassingly half-baked undergraduate research papers put up there - the need for accessible legal research is clearly desperate).

At least with respect to published articles, law-schools should take the initiative to put up past issues of their journals online. Surely Manupatra or IndLaw also have enough business incentive to take this up - searchable subscription databases would perhaps be better than absolutely nothing that exists at the moment.

Some of this stuff must be good ... only if someone could get to read it. Any thoughts (if some databases actually exist and I have ranted in vain, please enlighten anyway)?

PRS Legislative Research : An excellent resource on the Indian Parliament's legislative output and functioning

While hunting for a specific post in the archives of this blog, I began to classify the types of blog posts that I found there, and realised that very few posts have actually focused on legislation, or on the functioning of Parliament. Tarunabh's recent post about the Broadcast Regulation Bill is quite an exception. The bulk of posts on our blog have focused upon judicial decisions, while the posts which generated the greatest debates involved those focusing on particular Supreme Court decisions. In this, the posts on this blog reflect larger trends in Indian legal scholarship, as well as in Indian legal education, where the focus invariably is on courts.

Looking back at my own legal education in India, I have to accept that a focus on judicial decisions, particularly those of the Indian Supreme Court, was the predominant feature of much of the curriculum. There were no courses on Legislative Drafting (though my batch was fortunate enough to have one offered as an optional course, even as, reflecting the perceived practical utility of such a course, there were few takers for the course). Most of us were briefly exposed to the stages of enactment of a Bill when we dealt with the constitutional provisions in this respect, but this was done very cursorily, and I suspect that most law students do not have a good understanding of exactly what happens in the process by which a Bill becomes a duly enacted statute. The mandatory course on Statutory Interpretation that I studied focused more on the perspective of practicing lawyers and judges who have to interpret enacted statutes. A cursory glance at the present curriculum adopted at NLS, Bangalore and NALSAR, Hyderabad indicates that not much has changed since the mid-1990s in this respect.

This is indeed unfortunate, because, as all of us are aware, legislative activity accounts for some of the most important developments in our legal system. Academics who focus on India's legal system have long pointed to the large number of obsolete laws on our statutory rolls. Attention has also been drawn towards the fact that even recent statutes have problems embedded in the language in which they are drafted, as well as their inherent structure. Yet, this has not been accompanied by rigorous thinking (and teaching) about the kind of changes we should be incorporating in our drafting methods. The one Indian legal academic that I am aware of who focused on these questions extensively in his writings is P.M. Bakshi (at least some of his scholarship is available in the pages of the Journal of the Indian Law Institute).

In some respects, this is a malaise which affects many countries which adopted the common law system. Fellow graduate students from civil law jurisdictions would often point out to me that their legal education focused extensively upon legislative activity, and that several of them underwent extensive training in legislative drafting. Academics from civil law jurisdictions also tend to focus upon legislative reform, and legislative developments quite extensively and naturally. In some other common law systems, however, the situation is not as bad as in India, and law schools in particular have made efforts to focus on the issues highlighted here.

Reverting to the situation in India, research and teaching focusing on legislation is hampered by the fact that we do not have the tools to conduct proper research or develop teaching modules around the issue. For those interested in this isssue, some hope is now at hand. I recently came across the excellent website of the PRS Legislative Research team. Here, from their website, is some information about the team and their mission:

"PRS Legislative Research is an independent research initiative that aims to strengthen the legislative debate by making it better informed, more transparent and participatory. PRS is the first initiative of its kind in India. India is on the threshold of a major leap forward. At this juncture, it is critical to get a robust process of law making into place – a process which not only deepens that quality of deliberation in Parliament, but also welcomes inputs from those outside government

What we do:

PRS produces easy to understand 4-6 pages long Legislative Briefs on a range of Bills. These Briefs are sent to all MPs in both houses of Parliament, about 1200 NGOs across the country, and the top 500 companies. We also email our Briefs to more than 600 people in the media.

The Post Session Summary is a synopsis of all the legislative business that has been transacted in a Parliament session. The Pre-Session Alert is a summary of the legislative business that is likely to be transacted in the forthcoming session of Parliament. One page Bill Summary is a unique offering from PRS. Often Bills introduced in Parliament are long and complex. PRS summarises the contents of the Bill into one page, so the busy user can get a quick snapshot of the main features of a Bill. Feedback from stakeholders on Bills is critical. PRS will send your inputs and suggestions in Your Opinion Matters to the relevant government agencies. PRS also takes up Commissioned Research projects on issues pertaining to legislation and Parliament. "

The website of PRS has different sections which provide links to the full text of the following:

Bills Pending in Parliament

Recent Acts

Draft Bills

Bills Passed

For many of the specific entries, PRS provides short and helpful 'Legislative Briefs' which allow readers to get a quick sense of the proposed law. The archives date back to 2004, allowing researchers and students to study some of the most significant laws passed in recent years. In a section called "Vital Stats", the website provides interesting analysis of statistical data, which enables readers to monitor the activity of Parliament and get a sense of, for instance, the attendance record of MPs. The main page of the website also has a useful section which tracks news stories related to laws and disputes about laws, broadly defined. As of today, the website features legislative briefs about important bills such as the Competition Amendment Bill and the Microfinance Bill.

Some members of the Core team of PRS have been reaching out to mainstream publications to air their research findings. Indeed, reports by MR Madhavan and Priya Parker (on the Maintenance of Parents Bill, 2007) that appeared in newspapers and online magazines have been featured on our blog as well. Clearly, the members of PRS are seeking to highlight these issues and cause national opinion to focus upon the often pressing issues that they work upon.

I for one will be revisiting this website often to get a sense of important policy changes that are being proposed in Parliament. I suspect the site will be very useful to law students, scholars and practitioners in general.

The state of Indian legal education: An assessment of the NLS model and the importance of research

Harish's previous post highlights an important topical issue for the legal profession in India. Yesterday's issue of the Hindu carries an article by C. Rajkumar on the current state of legal education, which, while also relevant to the discussion initiated by Harish, deserves to be discussed separately. In his article, Rajkumar provides an assessment of the achievements and failures of the new, single-faculty law universities in India that have become the norm following the perceived success of the 'National Law School' model:

"There is no doubt that the establishment of the national law schools starting with the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bangalore successfully challenged this institutionalised mediocrity and succeeded in attracting serious students to the study of law. In fact, the study of law has received better attention among high school leavers in the country with the introduction of five-year integrated programmes. This has brought up new issues relating to pedagogy and approach to undergraduate studies for imparting legal education for high school leavers. The national law schools that have been established in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bhopal, and Jodhpur have all contributed in their own ways toward promoting excellence in legal education and research, particularly by attracting some of the brightest students to consider law as a preferred career option. But where these schools face significant challenges is in attracting faculty members who are top researchers in the field of law and can combine sound teaching methods with established track records of research. The lack of researchers in law and absence of due emphasis on research and publications in the existing law schools have led to the absence of an intellectually vibrant environment."

Rajkumar also sets out what he considers to be the biggest challenges for legal education in India, but it is his assessment of the NLS model which I found interesting and persuasive. Since several of us are products of that system, and we also have among our readers, current students in these new institutions, I wondered how others would react to Rajkumar's views.

Today's Indian Express has a column which complements Rajkumar's analysis on a larger point. Rajkumar asserts:

"Research can contribute significantly toward improvement in teaching and, more importantly, addressing numerous challenges relating to law and justice. If one were to look at the faculty profile of the world’s top law schools, one will find that there is great emphasis on research and publications among academics. Besides teaching, they contribute in significant ways by initiating and developing research projects in cutting edge areas, by professional contributions to international organisations, law firms and corporations, and by playing an important role in government policy formulation and promoting civil society activism. Law schools and academics in India need to go a long way in developing an institutional culture that promotes and encourages research that has the capacity to foster many positive changes in society at large."

The Express column, authored by C.P. Bhambri, is written as a reaction to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's recent speech announcing the policy decision to create 30 new Central universities. Bhambri argues that attention should instead be focused on disturbing practices in current institutions:

"The explanation for the prevalence of highly differential levels of academic performance among the universities, or within the same university, has to be found from within the university itself. First, the standards of a university depend on its teachers. None of the central universities has any evaluative criteria for the academic ranking of its faculty members or for identifying completely incompetent faculty members. Since universities do not have any internal mechanism of categorising faculty members as ‘performers’ and ‘non-performers, the net result is that every professor is treated as an equal, irrespective of performance and merit.

Second, professional bodies can play a very significant role in identifying the ‘meritorious’ and differentiating them from those ‘below standard’. But this is also not acceptable to universities and faculty members who start championing their ‘autonomy’ to counter the demand of ‘their accountability’. Third, the University Grants Commission, at the behest of the education ministry’s bureaucracy, has played havoc with procedures to determine the levels of performance of individual faculty members.

Any move to create new central universities should be informed by the experiences of existing central universities. But this is easier said than done. The teaching faculty has generally resisted any attempt to ‘differentiate’ on the basis of performance. The notion of a formal equality among individual staff members has given birth to the system of mechanical uniformity and this has, in turn, given birth to complete non-accountability on the part of faculty members."

Bhambri's critique is aimed at the established universities, and may not be applicable to the new law universities. The question to ask is whether the way out for the new law universities, as well as for the more established multi-disciplinary universities, is to replicate the model of the leading foreign universities where academic promotion is strictly tied with research and scholarship output. Some people in India have argued that this may not necessarily meet with the interests of the Indian legal community. Reactions?