In a conversation with Keerthana, Correspondent, Higher Education Review Magazine, Dr. Ghayur Alam, Senior Professor of Law and Dean, Undergraduate Studies, The National Law Institute University, Bhopal, shared his views and thoughts on the current challenges and opportunities facing legal education as well as what skills or qualities are most important for law students to develop during their legal education.Dr. Ghayur Alam has more than 25 years of teaching experience. He joined NLIU as an Assistant Professor of Law on August 1, 1998. He has delivered more than three hundred invited expert lectures on various topical issues of law in academic programs organized by institutions of national repute.
What innovative teaching methods or technologies are used to enhance the learning experience of students in legal education?
The society hitherto has moved from innovation to disruptive innovation despite such innovations in the field of learning-teaching. Case Method, Case Study Method, and Legal Aid Dispensary Method were the last significant innovations, towards the end of the 19th century US, in legal education. The invention of the internet led to the birth of generative artificial intelligence and the show of disruption will go on. Legal education is making use of such technologies in a big way pushing the frontiers of newer legal skills and knowledge.
In your opinion, what are the current challenges and opportunities facing legal education, and how can universities adapt to meet the evolving needs of students and the legal profession?
Opportunities always come in the garb of challenges. Legal education may be brought closer to the legal profession by:
- Establishing real legal clinics in law schools on the pattern of clinics in medical schools,
- Minimising overregulation,
- Sufficient funding from the State for affordable education,
- According to due emphasis to on legal skills-cum-knowledge with the aid of technology,
- Developing model curricula for all programs of legal study factoring local, regional, national and international problems on the one hand and linking them with conceptual, theoretical, statutory, and precedential frameworks,
- Optimising student-teacher ratio,
- Handling the problem of increasingly diminishing marginal enthusiasm level of students as they graduate from one semester/trimester to another,
- Realising that technology is both a genie and a demon at once and hence can be fruitfully utilized to promote the objectives of legal education,
- Evolving technology-neutral policy framework to convert the challenges posed by technologies into opportunities, and
- Equipping students with abilities which can surpass technology.
A few months ago, India partially opened her door to foreign lawyers and foreign law firms to practice in India which is likely to push the frontiers of merit and competition in the legal profession. Globalization of the legal market necessitates training in foreign languages and laws. If our students are not trained in either, India will not be able to reap the benefit of reciprocity in foreign legal markets.
In your perspective, how should we encourage critical thinking and problem-solving skills in students within the context of legal education?
Who can encourage critical thinking and problem-solving skills in law students? One who is trained in critical thinking, and problem-solving and is enthusiastic about it and knows how to play the role of intellectual-midwife and help students produce new and useful ideas. Freedom and equality of participants are the sine qua non for critical thinking. Thinking is a step-by-step process which may be linear, circuitous, lateral, and/or transcendental. If it exists – in the physical world and/or imagination (legal fiction) – then it can be known by taking the following steps: (i) understanding, (ii) comprehending, (iii) describing, (iv) analysing, (v) critically analysing, (vi) combining the results of last five-steps to transcend them to (vii) create a new and useful method of problem-solving. In law one must learn how (not) to learn:(i) fact, (ii) law, (iii) the relationship between facts and law, and (iv) fit facts into the most appropriate legal category. A person trained in law can understand facts of every type. Facts may be simple or complex. Facts may be related to day-to-day life. Facts may relate to complex technologies like biotechnology, information technology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. In law, facts win or lose cases.
In your opinion, what skills or qualities are most important for law students to develop during their legal education?
Law students are equipped with skills to avoid, or at least minimize, or solve a problem both efficiently and effectively. Legal skills can only be learnt, acquired and mastered through continuous practice under the guidance of a professional. Law is a discipline singularly empty of born geniuses. Epiphany and serendipity are rarities in law. READING-READING-READING-∞ is the first and foremost sine qua non of imbibing legal skills. Skills of speaking, writing, thinking, researching, and problem-solving necessarily depend on varied and eclectic reading. Students must actively participate in moot courts, debates, essay writing, and should also try to publish in law reviews and journals to hone their skills in research, writing, listening, argumentation, and counter-argumentation.
How do institutions balance the need for traditional legal doctrines with the evolving demands of a changing legal landscape?
Society evolves and so does law. During the process of evolution, existing legal categories may be modified, narrowed, broadened, eviscerated, and/or supplanted. Legal doctrines were/are born in response to social problems and keep on evolving as inarticulate major premises having the capacity to adapt themselves to the changing demands of time. Doctrines either subsume social change or provide the basis for analogy. During the interregnum, there may be maladjustment and dissonance between social and legal. But the beauty and utility of common law – a system and method of law developed in England and retained by her former colonies – lies in her ability to provide some solution to emerging challenges even during the interregnum. A person trained in the common law method knows how (not) to find a workable legal solution to a problem.
