The challenges of legal education in the 21st Century – Guest Post

“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice, he is the worst.”

-Aristotle.

Law exists to govern the people of the world. While maintaining order and peace remains the primary objective of the legal system, protection of freedom and individual rights always remains a necessity. With its sections and subsections, the legal system is created to provide the structure of the nation. That structure is essential for facilitating justice and acting as a catalyst in socio-economic development while buy online essay.

However, the need for implementing a quality legal education system is direly needed in undeveloped and even developing countries. To that end, here are a few challenges that the current legal system has to face:

1. Subpar Infrastructure

The number of active colleges providing legal education has increased over time. The statistics prove that. With more universities and colleges, the number of applicants has also drastically risen. However, the challenge came from an entirely different way.

• People never shied away from studying law, but the attitude was changing for the worse.
• The Bar councils also welcomed the influx of cash. But they failed to meet the demand to educate the rising number of students with enough books or professors.
• The students looked at legal education as a road to entrepreneurship.
• Moreover, the Bar Councils were not having any control over the colleges. This only boosted the colleges financially, as the standard of good legal students kept on diminishing.

2. Unsatisfactory Teaching Techniques

With the struggling infrastructure, it is only natural the universities fail to lure good faculty. The pay scale isn’t good. The prestige of the profession is nowhere near where it was. The new colleges that mushroomed out of nowhere only care about generating profit. The whole system revolves around generating the maximum profit from the students.

• Standard of teaching went for a toss because the colleges were not bothered to look beyond their profits.
• Cost-cutting techniques that the colleges adopted resulted in hiring more part-time lecturers than full-time professors.
• The part-timers do not have enough time or dedication to attend to each of the queries and doubts of hundreds of students.

3. Zero Motivation of Students

Although now the situation has changed, even sometimes before, the concept of an entrance examination was non-existent. People opted to go into law because they could not get into any other prestigious fields of study. Many even treated Legal education as a stopgap option before they moved on to some other jobs. The dropout rates because of this were alarming.

• Although there is a set entrance exam in place for getting into law schools, the criteria required for admission is not enough to test the calibre of the budding lawyers.
• The curriculums fail to test the applicants enough to understand if they are perfect for studying law.
• Following a specific pattern in tests can never highlight the general aptitudes of the applicants.
• Most Bar councils surprisingly have a low attendance benchmark to appear in exams.

If the students are not motivated enough to be regular about their studies, the whole purpose of studying law gets defeated.

4. Outmoded Syllabi and Curriculum

The students are getting fed with the same century-old chapters and concepts. The world is continuously upgrading with more contemporary laws, new regulations to keep up with the ever-evolving pattern of crimes. The same legal system is supposed to deliver justice but lags because the new legal graduates are unaware of the new laws.

• Social Engineering Skills are a part of every lawyer’s job description now. The old curricula do not consider this until now.
• Bar Council has finally mandated a new rule where before getting into law schools, you need to study social science subjects related to law somehow.
• The optional courses have increased in number. They have been modified into multi-disciplinary courses.
• The most important reform that came is the mandatory six months training session which will impart practical knowledge.

5. Instruction Medium

In most developing and underdeveloped counties, a standard language is absent until a certain level. There are multiple states, and each state has their regional language. The students do their schooling in their regional languages till the undergraduate level in most cases. That hampers the knowledge of a universally accepted language like English.

• Without any fluency in English, the students keep on failing to understand the subjects taught in universities.
• Most of the books, case studies that they follow are in English. Even the moot courts where the students practice courtroom simulations are done in English.
• So, unless students know basic English, getting through the entire legal education procedure is almost impossible.

6. Differences in Law Schools

Another prominent challenge legal education faces is the stark absence of uniformity in the school standards. Quite a few law schools have international accreditations. They have a reputation for consistently delivering fine legal officers for government or corporates. On the opposite side of the coin, there are a lot of below-average schools which don’t have the required infrastructure or faculties to educate students.

• They lack the necessary knowledge but easily get the legal degrees to practice law.
• The result gets pretty evident when a person without sufficient knowledge appears in a courtroom with a case.
• This extreme disparity amongst the students is certainly a glaring challenge in legal education.

7. Failing to convert students to Learners

The general form of legal curriculum gets pretty tedious. The students gradually lose interest and keep on mugging the course materials instead of learning. Failing to understand the psyche and behaviour of students is a major challenge.

New reforms about a doctrinal course, a more practical approach to hone their lawyer skills are crucial to deal with this challenge. A formative assessment must be there conducted to reform legal education.

8. Legal Research methods

A subject like “Legal Method” is yet to get introduced in some universities. The absence of an introductory course like that speaks volumes about what is wrong with the current legal education system.

The whole course introduction needs a redo. The alterations in legal research methods will come. A reason to expect such changes in the prominence of digital legal research. WEST LAW & LEXIS are two such new forms of research forms.

Parting Statement,

For the mentioned reasons and many more, the legal education system is facing a major slump. The quality of the colleges and schools are beyond satisfactory. Bar councils have made many recent attempts to bring some kind of reform to the system. However, the road is only half covered.

To provide an international standard of legal education in underdeveloped countries, suggestions of the regulatory authorities must be followed. Considering the socio-economic scenario in such countries, the factors like affordability must also be considered. The standards must be adopted but must be tailor-made to suit the needs and affordability of local students.

Author Bio: Dwayne Santner is one of the leading legal experts residing in Australia. He has multiple papers published on global legal education in leading journals. Currently, he is associated with MyAssignmenthelp.com as an online assignment writer. Apart from that, Henry takes an interest in classical music and Astrophotography as well.