Taking legal education seriously

For quite a considerable period of time, law schools in Bangladesh have been under constant criticism for not being able to produce efficient graduates who are expected to work as legal professionals both in bench and bar. With the global progress of legal profession, improving the quality and standard of legal education has thus become a prime challenge for Bangladesh. Among other limitations, conventional teaching methodology and curriculum with less-practical implication, inadequate orientation of doing research, limited establishment of clinical legal education, problem with innovating subject-specific pedagogy and un-popularisation of perceiving legal issues from an interdisciplinary approach – all together reinforces this challenge.

At this backdrop, the recent decisions of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh in the case of Professor Syed Ali Naki and others v Bangladesh and others (decided by the High Court Division on 13 April 2016) and Bangladesh Bar Council and others v A.K.M. Fazlul Kamir and others (decided by the Appellate Division on 8 February 2017) concerning the regulation of private university law schools have once again reminded us that law schools alone do not hold the responsibility of maintaining the overall standard and quality of legal education in Bangladesh. Other stakeholders such as Bangladesh Bar Council and University Grants Commission also bear the contributory duty of maintaining qualitative legal education in Bangladesh.

In these two cases, the Court has demonstrated a sense of dissatisfaction at the quality of private university-run law schools. And this has been the basis to issue a set of directions aiming to improve legal education in private university. To put differently, the decisions do not expressly scrutinise the standard and quality of legal education presently prevalent in many public universities. The decision is somewhat limited to analysing the quality of private university law schools only. But in reality, the quality and standard of legal education in many public universities is not up to the mark compared to many foreign and neighbouring law schools. Law schools are implausibly failing to expose their law students with practical knowledge of law and some professional skills such as research, drafting and advocacy skills, and client managing and interviewing skills, etc. due to lack of clinical legal education and outreach community programmes. In 2006, Law Commission of Bangladesh in its report Review of Legal Education in Bangladesh, criticised law schools for not teaching enough practical skills and for failing to fully integrate the learning of analysis with ethical and professional training. But no reference to this report was made in the above-mentioned cases which together can be taken as the first judicial decision on the issue of legal education in Bangladesh.

Considering legal education as a professional discipline of higher study, the Supreme Court has showed its judicial perception which deserves serious attention. However, the two decisions did not reflect upon a common perception that predominantly suggests that law schools in Bangladesh are only for preparing students with pure doctrinal knowledge of law, and hence, the duty of imparting practical knowledge through various professional skills development programmes is of Bangladesh Bar Council only. The judicial non-exploration of this perception might be one of the reasons as to why the Supreme Court was reluctant to dig into the fact that Bar Council has specific legal obligations to improve legal education through Continuing Legal Education (CLE) programme under the control and management of Bar Council's Legal Education Committee (LEC).

In the early nineties, Bar Council used to train up fresh law graduates under CLE programme for bridging the gap between academic knowledge acquired by law graduates and practical skills required in the profession. To improve the standard of examination for Bar Entry Course, LEC even deemed it necessary to render Bar Vocational Course (BVC) as compulsory programme and a prerequisite for enrolment as advocate. Subsequently, all such courses and initiatives were brought under the management of one autonomous flagship institution established in 1999 by the Bar Council named Legal Education and Training Institute (LETI). This Institute was meant to impart quality legal education and training with specific focus for law graduates. BVC was a prerequisite for obtaining professional license to do practice law in Bangladesh. However, at present LETI does not run this course.

Quite unexpectedly, the Court in its decision did not discuss about such significant initiatives of the Bar Council or perhaps the Bar Council did not draw the attention of the Court in this regard. As the Bar Council was one of the parties in both of the cases, the Court could have suo moto asked it to show cause as to why such programmes are not operative at present time. It could have also recommended reactivating such programmes under proper legal mechanism and with necessary improvement.  

Many directions delivered in the above mentioned cases by the Supreme Court deserve appreciation. Directions to shut down two-year LLB (Pass) Course, asking Bar Council to set up an age limit to be enrolled as an Advocate, and fixing up the maximum number of students (50 per semester) to be admitted in public or private university law schools are mentionable ones. However, anyone can question the authority of such directions held by the Constitutional Court which is seemingly not expected to impose any administrative decision upon law schools. The Appellate Division has rightly observed that without framing Rules under article 40(2)(t) of the Bangladesh Legal Practitioner's and Bar Council Order 1972, Bar Council is not likely to “interfere with the internal management of the universities”.

Reasonably one can understand that such a decision has come out mainly to limit the number of law graduates who sit for the Bar Council Advocate Enrolment Examination. This sort of judicial direction let us assume that we are yet to deconstruct the necessity of improving legal education in the context of legal scholarship and overall justice administration system of Bangladesh. Law schools, as Professor Dr. Mizanur Rahman believes, should produce new breed of 'anti-generic lawyers' who would actively facilitate change in the society and not simply litigate and interpret legal provisions for making money. The sooner we understand that law schools have many justice-specific contributions to offer to the people of our country, the better we improve legal education in Bangladesh.

The writer is Lecturer in Law, University of Asia Pacific.