GENERAL OBJECTIVES

It is not an easy task to consider how to improve legal education, even if all concerned agree there is a need for improvement. Generations of debate have not resolved the relative merits of liberal, general education versus a technical, professional orientation for the practice of law. Nor will we ever be able to reach universal agreement about the specific knowledge, skills, and values that law schools should teach if for no other reason than the vastly diverse practice settings in which our graduates work. There are some fundamental things about which we should be able to agree, however, and we should not refrain from trying to improve legal education simply because the task is difficult. Other countries are reforming their systems of legal education, and our attention improving the preparation of lawyers for practice in India is overdue. ⁴¹

Objectives of clinical legal education can be achieved under the supervision of law schools by undertaking massive works in the following areas:

A. Integration of Social Values through Curriculum

40 Based on the critiquing technique taught to faculty trained by the National Institute of Trial Advocacy.

41Supra n. 1 0, 12

Lack of social relevance and humanistic approach in the curriculum alienates social values, ethics, gender perspectives, views of minority etc. Therefore, by way of adding courses to the curriculum it address the issues of gender, cultural migration, minority and indigenous. peoples or allowing students to work with people of other cultures, we can equip law students to revisit their responsibilities to the marginalized section of the society.

The law curriculum should be introduced in integration with other disciplines. It is time to appreciate that the subject matter of economics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literature and psychology are essential to the education of the future law graduates. As the minimum, the budding lawyers must be taught in the economics of law, lawsuits and lawyering. ⁴²

B. Professional Practice and Skills Development

Members of the legal profession need to play the role of educator, and counselor.

Therefore, lawyers must be trained in skills that provide for a broader understanding of various facets of legal problems. Fundamental lawyering skills are important to provide social justice; however, any set of skills confined only to traditional methods of problem solving would be manifestly insufficient.

Students would be required to undergo the entire process of lawyering either by exposure to actual cases or in dramatic simulations. In both instances, they are -to act as lawyers and learn the details of lawyering from the experience of being a lawyer, real or simulating.

While the students. work under the supervision of a practicing lawyer or a clinical teacher, they are expected to face situations, analyse facts and take decisions independently. In interacting with the clients and confronting facts of diverse nature and presenting them in the court, the student lawyers get the real touch of the picture of the society. They understand law in the context of the problems of the society and can form opinion about the quality of a particular law. This awakens the students. to the issues of social justice and install in them a sense of professional responsibility. But how successfully they. will master the skills of lawyering and how much they will be sensitized to social problems will depend much on the quality of supervision by the clinical teacher.

C.

Externship

In externships, students either participate as lawyers in the representation of real clients under the supervision of practicing lawyers or they observe or assist practicing lawyers or judges at work.

These forms of experiencing aim:

• To broaden, extend, and deepen students' understanding of concepts and principles.

• To help students integrate theory and practice.

• To increase students motivation.

• To help students develop the knowledge, skills, and values they need as professionals.

42 Prof. Jay Erstling Reform of Legal System (1993).

Under this programme, post-graduate students are required to Work With leading NGOs, engage in para-legal activities in different parts of Bangladesh. This programme proved extremely useful for the students as it provided necessary motivation and ?sensitized and exposed them to the society and masses at large. Placement with legal services groups will offer Bangladeshi law students valuable opportunities to broaden their perspectives, integrate such services into their careers, and join the community of legal activists .

D. Law Clinic

Clinics remained focused on poverty law issues and formulated increasingly sophisticated educational regimes to accompany live client representation. Balancing the twin missions of service and education, the clinical movement became an institutionalized component of legal education.³² Today, there is little dispute about the merits of clinical legal education.

By addressing human rights and social justice concerns, law clinics and NGOs may help upgrade the quality of the legal profession in general. Dismay at the profession's low ethical and professional standards drove many top law graduates. into teaching or business in the past. The clinics and expanding NGO opportunities can improve legal training and encourage high-caliber graduates to practice law.³³

E. Legal Service

The primary obligation to provide legal services to the poor resides with the government, and to a lesser extent, with the legal profession and not with law schools. Nevertheless, law schools do have some obligation to contribute in solving the crisis of access to justice, and it seems obvious that the obligation is best accomplished by law school clinics assisting low-income individuals and communities that are underserved or have particular difficulty obtaining lawyers because of the nature of their legal problems.³⁴ Unless we design our clinics to involve students in the delivery of legal services to clients, we teach them too little about legal services work, underexpose them to the real world of low income clients, miss opportunities to engage students in seeking fundamental changes through class actions, and thus fail to meet the law school's obligation to make. a meaningful contribution to addressing the access to justice problem.⁴³

F. The Legal Advice

Legal advice is a corollary of legal education and is th e essential commitment legal aid. At the pre-litigation stage when the legal problem has already arisen, a legally informed person listens to the problem and gives advice as to how should the problem be dealt with.

The advice may be to avoid litigation, or it may take the shape of drafting an application or

43 Sajan Singh, “legal aid: human rioht to equality”.

a legal document. A competent legal advice saves uncalled for litigation; it may assist in rightly tackling the 'triton having legal consequences; or it maybe an education on a law point.

G.

Legal Aid

. The legal aid in the popular sense, understood by the present or potential beneficiaries, means only the representation in the court of law. Traditionally legal aid meant providing assistance to poor litigants who did not have sufficient financial means to run their cases in the court. Legal aid now has set broader goals to provide legal assistance to various communities especially disadvantaged ones to defend their rights in general, to make them aware of their specific rights and 'human rights in general, to motivate and help them to seek alternative dispute resolution in order that .cumbersome, hazardous and costly process of litigation can be avoided and with that end in view to organize negotiation, mediation, conciliation and arbitration amongst the disputants. Therefore, the system that is to be adopted in India has to be devised in such a manner that justice may be available easily, speedily and at less cost.

Law schools can establish legal aid cells where students and teachers can guide people in identifying their problems and make them aware of the remedies available to ¢em.³⁷ Students in these cells can provide paralegal services such as drafting affidavits, assisting in registration of marriages, births and deaths, electoral rolls, and filling out various forms.

This type of work gives students ample opportunity to learn client interviewing, counseling, and drafting skills. Another approach is for law schools to adopt a village and encourage students to conduct a survey to identify the problems that the people in that particular village face. After identifying the problems, students can approach the concerned authorities and arrange a public forum, often, local authorities are not responsive to local citizens concerns, especially those from disadvantaged communities. The idea here is to inform villagers about the programme and to encourage them to participate in the forum so that they can meet the concerned officers on that particular day and can settle their grievances in public. Students can be instrumental in the smooth functioning of the entire programme, and they can follow up on particular matters with the concerned officers.

These kinds of programmes are very effective, as the officers after giving an assurance publicly are not fulfilling their promises.

H. Public Interest Litigation

Student involvement in public interest litigation starts when they become sensitized to social justice issues in the course of regular lectures and at Legal Aid Society meetings. By this process of sensitization to the general social⁴⁴situation and the persistence of injustice in their own immediate society, students are able to identify various areas where they feel

44 Id. at 16

that the intervention of the judiciary might be required. The faculty should guide them as to how they should further investigate or research the issue to ensure that there is a real situation of injustice in which members of public could genuinely be interested" Thereafter, the students need to be advised to write to competent authorities who are obliged under law to remedy the injustice. If such authorities do not provide relief, the students with guidance from members of the profession may file a petition before the High Court Division together with all of the information that they have gathered concerning the problem, Public Interest Litigation operates in Bangladesh under special rules that allow any member of the public to present the case. Therefore, if the litigation proceeds the students themselves argue the case before the court.

1. Greater Emphasis on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)

Justice education requires us to place an even greater emphasis on negotiation, dispute resolution and collaborative working relationships. Our students must be taught how to resolve problems before they deteriorate into potential lawsuits, Our young lawyers need to be educated to recognize that even if the outcome of litigation is relatively certain, there is not always just one right answer to a problem. A money judgment may not be an effective solution for all parties, and so lawyers should work to provide for a lasting solution, one that is worked out through negotiation or appropriate dispute resolution technique. They need to learn that it is not enough to dig out the facts of the problem: they must understand the context in which the problem arose. A good lawyer can assist clients in articulating their problems, finding their interests, ordering their objectives, and generating, assuring, and implementing alternative solutions.³⁸

J.

Public Legal Education / Street Law Programme

In order to have access to justice, a person must know about his rights and the remedies for the wrong done to him as well as the forum for obtaining that remedy. The creation of good laws and their proper applications do right depend solely on the legislators and law enforcing agencies, but in a large measure depend on the consciousness of the people about their rights and duties in the society and on the knowledge of the law of the land which must protect their rights. Therefore, public legal education might be a powerful tool to educate the people about their rights and provide them with information about the laws of the country. ⁴⁵

Public legal education can be effected through lectures, discussions, publications and distributions of the simplified and adapted versions of Constitution, and international human rights instruments, etc. or adopting any other informal methods like production of street plays that focus on legal issues. As a part of the public legal education programmes lectures, seminars and discussions can be organized in villages, factories, professional unions, educational institutions and amongst particular disadvantaged groups like slum

45 38 Reno, Janet, “Lawyers as Problem-Solvers”, Keynote Address , journal of legal education 5-39 (1999)

dwellers, garment workers, or aborigines. Public legal education should also motivate the people to participate constructively in the creation of law, which has a pervasive influence on our society. People's participation in making laws and public policies will not only lessen the traditional use of conventional wisdom, and 'intuition' of the legislators and policy makers but it will also lessen their unresponsiveness to society's urgent problems.

K. Professional Ethics: Making Lawyers Work for the People

The whole idea of clinical legal education can go in vain if ethical side of legal profession is overlooked. The objective of clinical legal education is not merely to help students master the skills of lawyering and make them technically sound. In representing a client's case in the court, student lawyer must not resort to any means, which is morally condemnable and must avoid resorting to false witnesses and distortion of facts. While client's interest must guide his actions and efforts, ethical and moral values must also be upheld, for in that lies greater good of the society. In fact, in all the programmes that are linked with clinical legal education emphasis is always on the aspects of justice, protection of rights and progressive development of the society. While execution of these programmes requires moral and ethical motivation, successful implementation of the programmes will still further social and moral values in the students.

Ethical aspects of legal profession must be included in the law faculty curriculum.

Interdisciplinary approach to curriculum development is necessary to make the students more concerned about society, to make them understand the requirements of its progressive , and humanistic development. For the legal education to have any practical learning it is important to guide the students learn the lessons of ethics, morals, law, justice, human rights and society in their inter relationship, so that they can better identify their tasks in the service of the people and in progressive development of the society.

L .

Community Involvement. Diversity and Pro-people Practice

Our legal education has so far been concentrating on the lawyering process

and skills learning. To make legal education truly meaningful in the context of our social realities, effort must be made without further delay to accommodate the remaining objectives in the clinical curriculum. This, very likely, will necessitate establishment of 'out-reach programmes' where students will have the opportunity to face the 'real problems, and work on their solutions. This will allow the students to reflect on whether justice can always be done by litigation. This will enable the law schools to produce graduates who are better equipped for practice and to promote a fuller appreciation of the lawyer's functions in the society, giving. a human perspective of law, and a deeper understanding of Law as a social phenomenon and an intellectual discipline.