The explosion in the number of Law Colleges in India - Few thoughts

This post is inspired by a post written by Shamnad Basheer titled ‘Indian Legal Academia: Evolution of Phase 3?’ at Law and Other Things. Legal education in India has always been a reformer’s dream and the perfect example of implementer’s nightmare.

As has been noted by many writers Indian legal education scenario can be divided into three distinct phases, in this post I am not going to discuss about them in detail, one may refer to a paper titled 'Professor Kingsfield Goes to Delhi:American Academics, the Ford Foundation, and the Development of Legal Education in India' by Jayanth Krishnan or Shamnad Basheer’s post. However a short introduction is necessary to enter into the present discourse on ‘Explosion in the number of law colleges in India’ a trend which is very much a creature of Phase 3. The data used in this post to reach at various conclusions can be found at List of Law Colleges maintained by Bar Council of India.

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Phase 1

This covered most of the colonial era starting with the establishment of Law Faculty, Agra College in 1823 and went on till mid 1960s when the Gajendragadhkar Committee report came out. Till that time the total number of law colleges in the country was around 50 and already legal education was thought to be declining in colonial aura (a quick ballpark survey of the luminaries of Indian National Movement would show that most of them were qualified lawyers, indeed it was said that the epitome of social success in British India for a native would be either to be an ICS officer or to argue in High Court).
Phase 2

Quite contrary to the recommendation given by Gajendragadhkar Committee report the government went about the plan of law degree for everyone program, there was the first explosion in the number of law colleges while 26 new colleges were approved in 1941-1950, in 1951-1960 this number increased to 33 and exploded to 100, 116 new law colleges in the next two decades. This is where Phase 2 of Indian legal education scenario began (and continued till 2000). The total number of law colleges increased from 23 in 1940 to 298 in 1980 a staggering 15 fold increase. As obvious this created a huge demand for infrastructure which was unfortunately never provided by the government, there were no qualified teachers, no proper research facilities or in other words Indian legal education was in tatters. In late 1970s Upendra Baxi prepared a report ‘Towards a Socially Relevant Legal Education’, this report contained many novel ideas like a centralized institution for training law teachers, changing curriculum pattern, investing in infrastructure etc. However as with the previous reports this was also never acted upon, but the Bar Council of India was on a spree to open up new colleges and by 2000 the total number of law colleges stood at 550 ten times of the 1950 figures.
Phase 3

This phase nominally began with the establishment of National Law School of India University, Bangalore in 1986 which followed a 5 year education pattern where students may join after passing out of school, this law school seemed to have embodied the virtues of both Gajendragadhkar Committee report and the Baxi report. However the law school revolution began in right earnest in 2000 by when the other National Law Schools (like NALSAR, NUJS, NLU-J, NLIU-B) were established. Thus Phase 3 of legal education in India began in 2000, but as the law school culture promised to draw fresh talent, the wave of privatization and commercialization of education came in and BCI in its haste to promote the newly dignified 5 year law course committed the same blunder which was committed in the second phase namely the reckless approval of law colleges without even enquiring whether these colleges possess basic infrastructure or whether they follow the BCI-UGC curriculum.

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In between 2001-2008, 586 new law colleges have been approved which is more than the total number of law colleges in India till 2000. Thus in 7 years the total number of law schools jumped from 550 to 1136 and if one follows the trend shown in the graph above (a classic ‘J’ curve, much like the population curve of a developing country) there has been an exponential increase in the number of law schools in the present decade. This is bound to give rise to similar problems faced in Phase 2, with the tightening of entrance requirement for law teachers, the newly formed law colleges would have to depend on part time teachers, lawyers giving tuitions, retired judges as fellows etc. In fact we are already facing the problem, keeping aside the private law colleges we may just jog through the faculty page of many National Law Schools, the purported crown jewels of Indian Legal Education, and we will be disappointed to find that there aren’t qualified teachers to cover entire breadth of the prescribed law curriculum.

What can be the remedy? To quote Baxi ‘[W]e can move forward only from where we are in now’, due to political compulsions BCI cannot reduce the number of law schools so what can be done? There can be few short-term measures and few long term ones:

• First and foremost BCI should have a recommendatory role in legal education (bar council should regulate bar and not everything related to law, thus they should focus on how to improve the quality of bar may be by introducing bar exam etc. by recommending law curriculum but not by approving law colleges, let it be left in the hand of professionals), the primary role of accreditation and approval of law colleges should be left to UGC or any other super-regulatory authority mooted by Government.
  
• Stringent norms should be in place to ensure that a college has proper infrastructure like well stocked library, e-learning facilities, proper classrooms, qualified teachers, legal aid clinics, internship opportunities etc. before granting approval and not the mere formality that is done today.
  
• All private law colleges should be made non profit seeking organizations.
• There should be one state on university system whereby the National Law School of that state would have the administrative control over all law colleges within that state. Also there should be teacher and student exchange between law colleges throughout the country, this would ensure one legal standard throughout the country.
  
• All law students must come through a competitive screening test like CLAT to gain entry into a law college, maximum age of enrolling into a law college should be 20 years (already implemented by BCI).
  
• The 3 year law course should be abolished in a phased manner within 3 years, so too the part time law degree, law degree by correspondence, law degree in night colleges should be scrapped (It is quite interesting to note that in no other course is such a shortened degree alternative available).
• A periodic quality audit, which may be done by BCI, to ascertain as to whether a law institution is maintaining if not improving the standard and norm which it had to fulfill to get approval.
• Introducing legal education and law teaching specific rigorous LLMs (on lines of Columbia University) which would cater to the need of quality legal educators of future.