To improve legal education

This is undeniable that the quality of legal education in Bangladesh has been failing to satisfy the global standard of studying law. The general misunderstanding about the concept of university education may be the major cause of this failure. Thus, the improvement of legal education in Bangladesh depends largely on the understanding of the real meaning of university education. Given this, the following points deserve to be signified with a view to improving the quality of legal education in Bangladesh:    

1.        The overall improvement in the standard of teaching law is the fundamental precondition for the improvement of legal education in Bangladesh. This will require that the method of teaching law accommodate a three-fold scheme of dealing with the legal issues, which are (i) the doctrinal approach, (ii) case-based approach, and (iii) the clinical approach. 

2.    One of the major problems of the legal education in Bangladesh is that it is founded upon premise of nurturing the learners with the technique(s) of lawyering. But law being a sophisticated field of social science should not be studied with a monopoly of legocentrism. Because, Law has long been thought worth studying for its intrinsic philosophical or social interest and importance, which relates to but extends beyond its immediate instrumental value or professional relevance.  Thus, the legal curricula should accommodate the lesson plan considering social and political interests.   

3.    In the field of legal education in Bangladesh, there is a serious scarcity of reading materials including the texts, references and journals. In most of the cases, the outdated and substandard books are followed even by the teachers as reading materials. Thus, in order to improve the quality of legal education, every university must establish a resourceful law library, and should require the teacher to follow the standard and well-run reading materials.  

4.    Legal education is not only for lawyers. To make the legal education dynamic, it is thus indispensible to channelise the interactions between different stress and stances of the diversified legal professionals, such as lawyers, judges, academicians and activists etc. 

5.    Internship for a particular duration (or under the law clinic program) should be included within the curriculum as the partial requirement of the Bachelor degree of Law.

6.    The legal curricula should be designed incorporating specialisation of courses and programs that will facilitate the intensive and analytical study of legal enterprise. 

More importantly, the entire fabric of legal education should be founded upon an intellectual reorientation—a movement of searching for the legal philosophy of our own, and of eliminating the colonial understating of law, “inherited” as Goethe says “like an old sickness.”

Laila Binte Rahman
Student of Law, Eastern University