AN associate justice of the US Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, once said, “The impetus for the changes [in legal education] is the sense that what has been taught and how it has been taught may be embarrassingly disconnected from what anybody does.”

It is this statement that comes to mind when one thinks of the state of legal education in Pakistan.

Pakistani law, although based on a common law tradition, has been consistently infused with Islamic concepts coupled with local cultural, economic and social considerations. Hence, over time, in attempting to reconcile the complications in assimilating variant traditions, unique questions and issues have arisen. In order to address these local issues, development of home-grown jurisprudence is imperative. However, this has seldom been understood.

Legal education in Pakistan centres on local programmes dealing with domestic laws and external programmes solely educating students about foreign legal systems. Completing either one of the two programmes makes one eligible to be considered for enrolment as an advocate.

Although the local programmes attempt to teach local statutes and concepts, several factors have taken away from the development of jurisprudence peculiar to domestic affairs. Firstly, minimal pay scales and lack of permanent faculties in most institutes or universities have severely hampered the ability of academia to dedicate sufficient time to research and develop legal concepts from a Pakistani perspective.

As most faculty members in law departments or schools are full-time practitioners and part-time teachers, the whole concept of a separate academia dedicated to jurisprudence as opposed to procedural practicalities is non-existent.

Furthermore, the quality of teachers and the curriculum also leaves a lot to be desired, and essentially is only meant to cram certain basic knowledge into the minds of students as opposed to challenging them to think for themselves.

The sluggishness of the Pakistan Bar Council as well as the Higher Education Commission in attempting to set quality standards have added to the issues in imparting quality legal education.

Therefore, in light of the sorry state of affairs of most local programmes, legal education has seen a mushrooming of external programmes at local institutes, often described as ‘tuition centres’. Although they suffer from many of the same issues of local programmes, external programmes offer one singular advantage: perceived credibility.

However, while the perception of credibility may convince students to matriculate in such programmes, their overall effect, or lack thereof, on the development of local laws cannot be highlighted enough.

These external programmes, although designed to have the opposite effect, nudge students to rely on tried and tested formulas to secure the maximum number of marks without recourse to innovation or creativity in legal thinking.

Furthermore, the sole focus of such programmes on foreign legal systems and their research techniques seldom used in Pakistan also point to the severity of the disconnect between what is being taught and what is relevant for the field in question.

In a nutshell, the external programmes seem to focus on addressing issues and problems unique to foreign systems, so much so that graduates, although quite talented, are, ironically, out of their depth when it comes to starting a legal career under a local system, which ironically, is quite alien to them.

In fact, the said graduates enter the local system learning the tricks of the trade through trial and error, sometimes at the expense of clients.

Although no short-term solution is in the offing, certain measures may drastically be taken so as to arrest the criminal lack of focus on local laws and jurisprudence.

In fact, the Supreme Court had already taken a step in that direction as far back as 2007 by, amongst other things, directing a special committee to propose recommendations for improving curriculum and the standards of legal education in Pakistan. However, and unfortunately, to date, the exercise appears to be a work in progress.

That said, any such set of proposals may benefit from concentration on the importance of well-rewarded permanent faculty dedicated to academic pursuits. Universities and institutes must be set up and maintained with the objective of being research universities utilising the Socratic method of teaching to enhance the quality of students being generated each year.

Legal education must be uniform throughout the country, and not be separated into local and external programmes. In fact, as noted, any programme which essentially focuses on a foreign legal system without any mention of or concentration on local jurisprudence should be discouraged.

If practical considerations deter the conversion of such programmes into local ones, at the very least, it should be proposed that a minimum number of courses imparting knowledge of local laws and concepts, including clinical legal education, may be made compulsory so as to familiarise such students with the Pakistani legal system.

These steps won’t resolve all issues afflicting legal education in Pakistan. However, they can be an initial move towards legal education reforms.

It may be noted that although education as a whole has been neglected by the corridors of power, the absolute lack of interest in legal education has been appalling, especially considering that legal education is the bedrock on which a strong, independent legal structure is erected and advanced.

It is time that the pertinent authorities/bodies, such as the Pakistan Bar Council, realise that the actual battle for the rule of law lies not on the streets, but in our universities.

The writer is a lawyer.

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