Legal Education: Protesting the BCI's Consultative Deficit

Mainstream media has been abuzz with news of a paralytic strike by the Bar Council of India (BCI), protesting against the divestiture of their control over legal education via the proposed Higher Education and Research (HER) bill. The strike has had its fair share of critics, including a contempt petition as also a letter to the Supreme Court of India. 

Without going into the merits or otherwise of the HER bill, it is clear that the BCI has never consulted meaningfully with legal academics, despite a statutory mandate to do so under the Advocates Act. In an Indian Express editorial, I'd argued as below:

"Some say that law is an instrument of power. Little wonder then that regulating access to the corridors of legal power is lucrative business — particularly when the regulatory turf lies in the world’s largest democracy, which now boasts more than 900 law schools.

Recently, the Bar Council of India (BCI) was in the news for protesting attempts by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to usurp its superintendence of legal education through the Higher Education and Research Bill, 2011. This squabble is merely one of many in a series of turf wars between various agencies to assert their dominance over legal education.

All of this naturally raises the question: does the BCI have the competence to regulate legal education in the first place? In terms of legal competence, the answer appears to be in the affirmative. As for institutional competence, the less said, the better.

Even in terms of legal competence, there is an important caveat that seems to have been missed by the BCI in all these years of regulatory dominance. Section 7(1)(h) of the Advocates Act, 1961, requires the BCI “to lay down standards of... (legal) education in consultation with the Universities in India imparting such education”. Past records do not suggest any meaningful consultation with universities. While castigating this deficiency, the National Knowledge Commission noted that of the 10 members of the BCI’s Legal Education Committee, only one was a full-time legal academic.

The lack of proper consultation is not just anathema to the law, but has also had an impact on the quality of BCI norms... To add to its woes, the 184th Law Commission Report noted several complaints from law schools that the BCI’s directives often “tend to be arbitrary.

......the BCI would do well to keep in mind that the purpose of law schools is not to merely mass-produce technically competent lawyers ready to serve the bar. Rather, it is to cultivate critical thinkers, social reformers and creative leaders free to pursue an array of career options. Law schools must therefore be encouraged to experiment with their curricula and conceptualise courses that foster critical and creative thinking beyond the black letters of the law."


Protest Letter

In order to protest against this sordid lack of consultation, some of us came together and drafted a letter to the BCI. This letter has been signed by leading academics such as Professor MP Singh (ex VC of NUJS and current Chairman of Delhi Judicial Academy) and Professor NS Gopalakrishnan of CUSAT.


The protest letter takes issue with deplorable comments made by the BCI in its submission to the Parliamentary Committee reviewing the Higher Education and Research Bill (HER). I extract the relevant portion of our letter below:

"We take very strong exception to your statement to the Parliamentary Standing Committee as below:
  

"How the academicians can decide the curriculum of legal education? The litigants, the needy people come in contact of lawyers, explain their problems and the lawyers and judges in turn, work out the solutions. So the lawyers are well conversant with the problems, and they are the best person to decide as to what is needed for the students perusing legal education. The norms, curriculum and syllabus are thus, the domain of Advocates, so far legal education is concerned. The academics have a limited role to teach the books which are almost all authored either by noted lawyers or the Judges."

We believe this is a seriously misguided sentiment and severely denigratory of the role that legal academics have played and continue to play in legal education today. While the efforts of practising lawyers and judges are no doubt important, the primary responsibility for legal education ought to vest in those that teach law full time i.e. legal academics/educationists."

The letter also calls into question a BCI circular mandating students and law teachers to register and pay money for an alleged online portal/database.
 

If any legal academics (or researchers) are interested in signing onto this letter, please email me (shamnad@gmail.com) and I will add your name. Please mention your full name, designation and your institutional affiliation (as you would like to appear in the protest letter). Please do this within the next couple of days, since we intend to submit this to the BCI at the earliest.
 

Petition at Change.org

We would also like to solicit the support of legal practitioners, law students and others within the larger ecosystem of the "law" (which really includes any member of the public). For this purpose, we have a pithy petition at change.org. You can support the petition by simply clicking on the link here and adding your signature.

Lawyers' Boycott of Accused: The Supreme Court Weighs In

Talha Rahman had written earlier on the issue of lawyers' deciding to boycott certain kinds of "accused". He now has an update to his earlier post as below.

In A.S. Mohammad Rafi v. State of Tamil Nadu, AIR 2011 SC 308, Justice Markandey Katju of the Supreme Court of India took the opportunity “to comment upon a matter of great legal and constitutional importance which has caused deep distress….”

In this case, the Bar Association of Coimbatore had passed a resolution that no member of the Coimbatore Bar will defend the accused policemen in the criminal case against them. This apparently was a case against policemen for assaulting lawyers in one of the many clashes between the police and the bar.

Taking judicial notice of the fact that “several Bar Associations all over India… have passed resolutions that they will not defend a particular person or persons in a particular criminal case… Sometimes the Bar Associations passes a resolution that they will not defend a person who is alleged to be a terrorist or a person accused of a brutal or heinous crime or involved in a rape case...” , the Supreme Court held that “such resolutions are wholly illegal, against all traditions of the bar, and against professional ethics. Every person, however, wicked, depraved, vile, degenerate, vicious or repulsive he may be regarded by society has a right to be defended in a court of law and correspondingly it is the duty of the lawyer to defend him.”

Rule 11 of Section II of Part VI of Bar Council Rules framed under Section 49(1)(c) of the Advocates Act, 1961, provides that “An advocate is bound to accept any brief in the Courts or Tribunals or before any other authorities in or before which he proposes to practise at a fee consistent with his standing at the Bar and the nature of the case. Special circumstances may justify his refusal to accept a particular brief.” Such ‘special circumstances’ have been understood to mean circumstances giving rise to a ‘conflict of interest’. Resolutions similar to the resolution of the Coimbatore Bar Association are known to have been passed by the Bar Association of Faizabad and apparently also by the Bar Association of Pune that prevented the alleged ‘terrorists’ from having any legal representations. The impact of absence of effective legal representation and denial of right to have a counsel of one’s choice would probably be assessed when these cases reach the appellate stage.

Request for Deferring Bar Exam and Mulling on Sudeer

I reported earlier on the prospect of an Indian bar exam in the aftermath of a Supreme Court direction in Bar Council of India vs Bonnie FOI Law College.

Kian Ganz, the dynamic founder of Legally India ran a piece a few hours back on a letter that we sent to Gopal Subramanium (Chairman of the Bar Council of India) requesting for a deferral of the proposed bar exam:

"The new bar exam for law graduates is understood to be held in late August with the Bar Council of India (BCI) set to announce the syllabus in a matter of days. Meanwhile, NUJS Kolkata final year students have petitioned BCI chairman and solicitor general Gopal Subramaniam to postpone the exam until 2011 because they argue it prejudices students and is unconstitutional without amending the Advocates Act 1961."

I reproduce the letter that we sent the BCI Chairman below. I am particularly interested in readers' views on whether or not the BCI (Bar Council of India) can introduce a bar exam without an amendment to the Advocates Act.

Dear Mr Subramanium:

My heartiest congratulations on your recent election as the Chairman of the Bar Council of India (BCI). It is rather fortuitous that you were elected to this important post soon after your had articulated your vision for an all India bar exam before the Supreme Court in Bar Council of India vs Bonnie FOI Law College.

As you are aware, during the consultative process undertaken by you in the context of Bar Council of India vs Bonnie FOI Law College, I had submitted a paper to you advocating strongly for a bar exam. I attach this again for your reference.

Needless to state, a number of us applaud your initiative and do hope that it will go a long way towards improving the quality of lawyers in India. However, we are concerned about the prospect of holding such exam at such shot notice i.e. a mere two months from now.

May we please request you to defer the proposed bar exam to next year, such that it only applies prospectively to candidates that graduate (with LLB degrees) next year?

First, as you will appreciate, effective notice of the exams came to our students (I speak of the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata where I teach) only last week. Although the exam was mandated by the Supreme Court judgment (Bar Council of India vs Bonnie FOI Law College) in December 2009, this order was not made public and is, to this day, not available on the Supreme Court website. I had posted a copy of this order on “Law and Other Things”, a blog, on 5th April 2010.

Subsequent to this blog posting, some newspapers had interviewed you and reported on the prospects of a bar exam. However, even at this stage, most students did not think that it was logistically possible to hold the exams this year. And many of them did not think that such exams could be held without a legislative amendment (in the light of the Supreme Court ruling in V Sudeer, an aspect I will dwell upon later in this letter).

It was only pursuant to my telephonic conversation with you on the 8th of May, that I understood that you were planning on conducting the exams in July-August this year. On the very same day, I announced this to our students at NUJS, who were extremely concerned at this short notice (a mere 2 months) and have requested me to forward their representation to you, which I attach with this letter.

As you will appreciate, a bar exam has never been held in this country since the 1970’s and students had a legitimate expectation that there would be no exam this year. With only a few weeks left for most students to graduate, it will inconvenience them to a very high degree. Many of them have signed contracts with law firms and lawyers and are scheduled to begin working in the months of June-July. Lawyers and law firms may have hired them on the expectation that they are ready to go on day one and not handicapped from appearing in court or practicing law, owing to a bar exam, that has been suddenly instituted after 35 years. Many other students are going abroad for jobs and higher degrees (LLM’s) and will be placed at a great disadvantage owing to this sudden announcement.

Secondly, this exam may prove logistically difficult for your team to execute at this late stage. You are of course the best judge of this, but if I may please be permitted to recount our own experience with such exams: it takes the national law schools a good 10 months’ time to plan and execute the CLAT entrance exam each year–which as you know has approximately around 15,000 candidates each year and only 11 law schools within its fold. More importantly, it already has a history (although CLAT is 3 years old, individual law schools conducted their own exams for several years prior to CLAT), whereas the bar exam that you envisage will be held for the first time in 35 years. Importantly, this exam will require immense planning and co-ordination as it is likely to have at least 45,000 candidates, if one assumes that the 900 odd law schools in the country might generate at least 50 candidates on an average this year.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the V Sudeer case (V. Sudeer v. Bar Council of India, AIR 1999 SC 1167) does not appear to permit a bar exam by the BCI (Bar Council of India) without an amendment to the Advocates Act. In Sudeer, the court categorically held that any additional eligibility criteria for the practice of law over and above what was mentioned in Section 24 of the Advocates Act was unconstitutional. Particularly if such additional criteria amounted to either a bar exam or a training of some sort, since the power to mandate such exams/training was expressly taken away via an amendment in 1974 to the Advocates Act. As you are no doubt aware, in the light of the 1974 amendment, once a student legitimately cleared his or her exams at a recognized University, he/she was entitled to enroll in a state bar council and practice before any court of law, without having to undergo training or take an exam of any sort.

Therefore, if such an exam needs to be conducted by the BCI, it can be done only through a legislative amendment. The court in Sudeer stressed that an enrolment comes with an automatic right to practice—subject to conditions of practice framed by BCI, High courts and the Supreme Court.

Therefore, the BCI cannot, in my personal view, attempt to pass off a bar exam as a “condition of practice”, since such an exam would effectively emasculate the concept of enrolment i.e. enrolment is meaningless without the right to practice. In short, the court is likely to see this cleverly crafted condition of practice as nothing more than a camouflaged “pre-enrolment” condition, a condition that the BCI has no authority to impose under the present statutory scheme.

As you are aware, the court in Lawyers Collective vs Ashurst defined the term “practice” to widely include not just the right to appear before courts, but to also include all kinds of non-litigious practice as well (transactional work and legal advise etc). Therefore divesting enrolled lawyers of the right to practice upon enrolment will have serious consequences for all law graduates this year. Rather than expending resources into the conduct of a bar exam this year and risking the wastage of resources in the event that the court strikes down the bar exam as outside of the BCI’s current competence and therefore unconstitutional, we strongly urge you to push for an amendment to the Advocates Act and conduct the exam next year.

Given all the above circumstances, I hope you will kindly consider deferring this exam to next year, such that it applies prospectively to only those law graduates that pass out next academic year. To conclude, let me please reiterate that we are very much in support of your wonderful initiative for an all India bar exam and are ready to help in whatever way you deem fit to make this a success. We however feel that rushing it through within the next 2-3 months may result in a sub-standard and badly executed exam and prove counterproductive to your vision for regulating the profession in a more optimal manner.

Warm wishes,

Shamnad Basheer