Regulating Postgraduate Legal Education in India - A Normative and Analytical Study

Legal education aids in creating and maintaining a just society grounded in historical realities of working of the legal order. The dynamic nature of legal education plays a vital role in sensitizing the community towards the ideals of equality, dignity, and liberty and also aids in identifying and eradicating societal problems with an aim to secure justice through the rule of law. Legal education, therefore, must be imparted in a way that helps in realizing these objectives; the policies and regulations for the same should also be tailored accordingly. Unfortunately, legal education in India has been longing for appropriate reforms for quite long and has unfortunately taken a backseat when all this became a matter of power struggle for the regulators. One such being seen in the Bar Council of India Legal Education (Post-Graduate, Doctoral, Executive, Vocational, Clinical and other Continuing Education), Rules, 2020. These rules bring some significant changes to the existing framework of postgraduate legal education, the most prominent and controversial of which is the abolition of one-year LL.M, a course introduced by the University Grants Commission (UGC).  Despite the UGC being the regulator of higher education in India, the Bar Council of India (BCI), whose role is 'to recognize Universities whose degree in law shall be a qualification for enrolment as an advocate' has abolished the course. This highlights that policies for legal education have often been made with incoordination and thus have enshrined hostility between the principal protagonists. These uncoordinated policies ultimately act in the detrimental interests of Roscoe Pound's social engineers, who are tasked with building an efficient structure of the society. Therefore, the paper attempts to understand if the BCI has the requisite power to abolish the one-year LLM course. Various rules, regulations, reports, recommendations and responses to Right to Information (RTI) petitions have been analyzed to draw an outline of power dynamics between the three existing protagonists i.e., the BCI, the UGC and the affiliating Universities to strike a fair balance amongst them in the interest of legal education in the country. The paper hypothesizes that vesting the regulatory authority with the Bar Council of India frustrates the broad and liberal objectives of legal education. The paper aims to answer whether this decision of the BCI will help achieve the goal (if any) it seeks to achieve and the fate of legal education under the BCI.