The Asian Journal of Legal Education
Legal education has evolved over several
centuries across the globe, and its effectiveness is a matter of significant
concern not merely for legal practitioners but also for society in general. One
approach that has been gaining considerable attention is the concept of
experiential legal education, which is at different levels of implementation
across the world. Countries such as the United States and Canada have been
pioneers in implementing this form of legal education, which is also known as
clinical legal education (CLE), whereas India is striving to catch up. This
article attempts to inspect and compare the development and implementation of
CLE in Canada and India. The findings from the comparison are then utilized to
inform the way ahead for CLE in India. While pursuing this objective, the
article also examines the concept of experiential education, in general, and in
the context of legal education, in particular. Moreover, insights are provided
regarding CLE. The status of experiential legal education in Canada is
reviewed, and the author’s experience in Canada under the Shastri Research
Student Fellowship (SRSF) is detailed to provide the author’s insights
regarding the implementation of experiential legal education in Canada. The
evolution of experiential legal education in India is also detailed, together
with insights regarding the regulations of the Bar Council of India (BCI) as
are relevant to CLE. Finally, the article compares the author’s opinion of the
present status of CLE in Canada and India and provides recommendations to
enhance the future implementation of CLE in India.
Over the past years,
law schools have encountered considerable pressure to participate in grave
self-examination regarding their effectiveness in helping their students and in
undertaking significant changes to syllabus and pedagogy, especially with
regard to offering opportunities for experiential learning and making sure that
graduates are equipped for practice. In fact, a 2007 report by the
Carnegie Foundation reported that ‘[t]he gap between learning how to think like
a lawyer and being capable of acting like a lawyer, both clinically and morally
is, if anything, greater than it has ever been before’. Furthermore, this
report, in answer to this mismatch, advocated a substantial focus on skills
concerned with practice and values intended to instil a ‘sense of professional
identity and purpose’. The Carnegie Report concluded that legal education
should endeavour to combine ‘in a single educational framework, the two sides
of legal knowledge: (a) formal knowledge and (b) the experience of
practice’. Another publication that called for similar reforms was Best
Practices for Legal Education: A Vision and a Roadmap (‘Best Practices’).
This report further detailed the elements, curricular and pedagogical, that
most significantly impact the preparation of graduates to be professionals who
are capable and compassionate. The response of institutes of legal education
and related stakeholders to these, and other similar reports, has been to
direct their attention to experiential legal education.
In this regard, Canada was among the first countries to experience a wave of experiential legal education. India is a later adopter of this concept of experiential legal education, which is referred to as clinical legal education (CLE) in the country. This article attempts to compare the present status of experiential legal education in Canada and India based on the author’s experiences in both countries. In doing so, it seeks to trace the evolution of experiential legal education in the two countries, together with their present status of implementation.
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