Demand grows for legal education commission to revamp curriculum, funding and course length - The Times of India

Demand grows for legal education commission to revamp curriculum, funding and course length

The demand for an independent Legal Education Commission, to overhaul outdated law curricula, integrate emerging disciplines like AI and international arbitration, and shift academic governance from elected practising lawyers to dedicated legal educationists, is gaining momentum.

Hearing a PIL filed by Adv Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, CJI Surya Kant pointed at the need to set up a dedicated expert body to examine the legal education framework.

In his writ petition filed in 2025, Upadhyay sought direction to set up a Legal Education Commission or an expert committee comprising eminent educationists, jurists, retired judges, advocates, and professors to review syllabus and the duration of LLB, LLM courses to attract top talent to the legal profession.

“The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 promotes four-year undergraduate programmes across professional streams, yet the Bar Council of India (BCI) has not taken steps to review the syllabus, curriculum, or duration of LLB and LLM courses. The existing five-year BA LLB and BBA LLB structure places an unnecessary financial strain on middle- and lower-income families,” says Upadhyay. “The five-year duration is disproportionate to the actual course material,” Upadhyay adds, drawing a comparison with professional technical degrees.

“A BTech consists of four years of focused education, while integrated law degrees at NLUs and affiliated colleges consume five years while forcing students through unrelated arts and commerce streams, a structure designed more to extract fees than to build core legal competence.”

The current push gained momentum in 2024, when a parliamentary standing committee on personnel, public grievances, law, and justice, chaired by the late Sushil Kumar Modi, formally recommended establishing an independent national council for legal education and research to take over non-litigation legal education from the Bar Council of India (BCI).

The primary objective of the proposed commission should be securing financial sustainability and academic autonomy for law universities by granting them Institute of National Importance (INI) status, on par with IITs and NITs. “Most NLUs depend on state funding, which limits their expansion and research capabilities. Granting INI status would allow law universities to receive direct grants from the Union government, strengthening infrastructure, faculty development, and global competitiveness,” says Srikrishna Deva Rao, vice-chancellor, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.

Legal academics have strongly backed the demand, stressing that academic governance must be led by dedicated educationists rather than elected practising lawyers. “There is a pressing need for a Legal Education Commission because legal education is currently governed by lawyers who generally lack expertise in curriculum design. We need a dedicated regulator, similar to the National Medical Commission (NMC), to bring genuine reform,” says Prof Faizan Mustafa, vice-chancellor, Chanakya National Law University, Patna, adding, “While BCI does invite a few professors as special invitees to its Legal Education Committee, they are not full-time members, who often lack a decisive say.

Ultimately, the BCI is a body of professional lawyers, not educationists.”

“Legal education must get a full-time regulator, headed by the CJI as president, the BCI chairman as vice-president, and an eminent law professor as secretary. The BCI may continue to play a major role in undergraduate professional education, but LLM and PhD programmes should fall entirely under the new commission,” Prof Mustafa adds.

The PIL challenges the five-year duration of integrated courses: “MNLU Nagpur conducts 50 exams in a five-year course, of which only 32 are law-related, and remaining 18 are in economics, sociology, history, political science, english, and other optional subjects.

This confirms that law subjects can be taught in three years, or a maximum of four, and less relevant subjects are taught only to extend the duration of the course,” says Upadhyay.

Legal experts, however, push back against eliminating these additional disciplines, noting that interdisciplinary grounding is critical for developing legal minds.

“Unless a student learns sociology, political science, and national history, they will lack the broader perspective required to evaluate social contexts, anticipate future legal needs, and draft effective legislation,” says Prof Balraj Chauhan, former vice-chancellor, DNLU Jabalpur, NLIU Bhopal, and RMLNLU Lucknow.

Rather than scrapping the fifth year entirely, Prof Chauhan suggests repurposing it into practical training. “If academic coursework is streamlined into four years, the fifth year, as recommended in past judicial observations, should be made a mandatory clinical year working alongside senior advocates or within the legal aid system before entering practice or the judiciary. That would make the five-year investment complete and career-ready,” he adds.

Powered by शिक्षा खबर Skillogy