Problems of pursuing career in law in India
This year over 17,000 students gave All India law entrance test (AILET) and around 65,000 gave the Common law admission test (CLAT). The figure seems to grow at an unprecedented rate since the inception of common law entrance examination for the National Law Universities, offering Five year integrated BA+LL.B course.
As one among these thousands I decided to vent my opinion about the impediments as well as nectar of the NLUs. There has been no doubt that National law Universities have ameliorated the standards of legal education in India.They are also doing a commendable feat by attracting many first generation lawyers (Candidates whose parents are not from Legal fraternity). But there is a long way to go for these islands of excellence to bring the best out of Indian youth. Its only when Law as a field is known to all and proper awareness is spread about how to go in this career and its prospects will we able to refine the judiciary and actualize the purpose for which these institutions were established.
The impediment of attracting students is tripartite-social, institutional, and professional. Social impediments include various elements that deter students from taking law as profession. Institutional impediments include issues that stem from the universities and their management per se. Thirdly, its important to peruse the innate problems of the legal profession which forfend students from taking law.
Social Impediments :- With all due respect to my profession, law is not the domain which has gained positive response from the Indian society or for that matter any society. Yes, this bitter reality is indeed bitter. The fact that your excellence and prowess involves a guilty to be made innocent is not something that is socially well accepted. We in the fraternity may call it as impartial delivery of justice but at the end of the day it is a criminal being at large and unpunished because you were there present in the court as his advocate. It comes to me as no surprise to neglect a profession which involves lying, and by lying I mean pleading before the judge that your client is innocent when you very well know the reality. To be frank even the author had the same notion before he became a law student. Whats more even the stalwarts of bar like Fali S. Nariman have ended themselves in quandary after being in profession for many years. Moreover even if we ignore the disfavour of legal profession in a typical Indian’s milieu, still law stands nowhere when compared to engineering and medicine. The prestige, social acceptance and financial security that these two fields give is way unparalleled before any line of work. So much so that a typical Indian never considers options other than medicine or engineering until and unless he is either rejected in that field (not faring well in competitive exams) or the candidate himself considers the status quo to be not his cup of tea.Possible exception to the above factor will be the case where a different profession is practiced in his family aka …nepotism. The underlying logicis that just because a candidate fares well or moderate in science doesn’t mean he couldn’t do wonders in law, but because law as a career never crosses his mind it seems all terra incognito. Hence we end up having a moderate engineer or a doctor at the cost of an exceptional lawyer.
Institutional Impediments :– The institutions had their own share in deteriorating the standards of legal education in India which in turn has led to the social disfavour. The institutions not only include the colleges that proliferated post independence leading to substandard delivery of legal education. Indeed the cases of evening classes and absence of erudite academicians made obtaining legal education a cinch. The worth of a law college had fallen precisely because these institutions did every bit to let it fall. Fast forward to present we find that quite many National Law Universities if weighted according to measure which made law colleges guilty in the past will not show the result otherwise. Added to this is the whopping fees of National Law Universities. Make no mistake an amount of ten lakhs is a substantive amount considering a typical Indian family. If we look at the prospects after graduating from these NLU especially if a student doesn’t make it to top six NLUs, the question of covering the cost is quite grave. This is not to say that one must fall back to the old way of covering the cost by cutting corners in imparting education but the management should try to keep the fee as low as possible. The recent cases of scams in the NLU administration (even in top NLUs) shows that a lot has to be done in this section too.
Professional Impediments :- Every profession has its pros and cons and law is no exception to it. So much so that if we ignore the above artificial impediments majority of the students will get deterred by the innate impediments in the field of law, many of which are beyond one’s control and would hamper the due process of law if we dare to change it for good. Firstly, the demand for lawyers in any society at any given point of time would be far less then fields like engineering, management and medicine. Then comes the fact that Law still is an old guys club. With due deference to young blood in the profession, that according to Honorable Justice Rohington Fali Nariman form the group of top lawyers (referring to their professional ethics), law still tests you through time before you establish yourself with a substantive goodwill. When it comes to sectors other than corporate law, the argument stated does really go home. Fame is tantamount to net worth in professions and the worth of a heavy wallet is way more when you are young and free then when your hair turns grey and someone calls you grandpa. A typical Indian philosophy would definitely go for one crores in twenties or thirties then ten crores in one’s nineties. Added to this, there is what one may say as nepotism.People who make it large in profession are more often than not lawyers born in lawyers family. Rarely do we find folks from the lowest strata of the economy making it large in the profession.