The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law, and Justice recently submitted a significant report on legal education, making several path-breaking recommendations to strengthen the quality of legal education in India. Since Independence, legal education, unlike medicine and engineering, has not been a top priority for India’s policymakers.
Things started to change for the better in the 1990s with the advent of the national law universities (NLUs) in India. Buoyed by the winds of liberalisation and globalisation, the Indian economy in the 1990s threw up many new opportunities for lawyers, which, in turn, led to bright young students opting to study law right after school. Several NLU graduates got placed in high-paying law firm jobs while many others went abroad to study at top universities, with quite a few bagging prestigious scholarships such as Rhodes and Chevening.
However, the same cannot be said about hundreds of other law schools nationwide that essentially represent a “sea of institutionalized mediocrity”. Most of the NLUs too, while successfully attracting excellent students, have failed to emerge as centres of excellence in legal research. This is borne by the fact that only two Indian law schools, Jindal Global Law School and National Law School of India University, figure in the QS rankings of the top 250 law schools worldwide.
