I am a Juris Doctor. Doctorate in Jurisprudence. JD like an MD is a post-graduate, professional degree. A Juris Doctor is somebody who successfully completed the four-year undergraduate programme at an American University, did substantially well on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and then got through three years of rigorous legal education.

According to the American Bar Association, a JD is to be treated as equivalent of a PhD. A JD is sufficient qualification to appear before the highest court of law in the US, the United States Supreme Court in Washington DC, conditional upon passing the bar exam. A JD, however, is not sufficient to appear before the Lahore High Court!

What do you need to be able to appear before the Lahore High Court? Nothing, or I should say, guts; the guts to risk the rare possibility that you might be questioned as to your credentials. All you need to do is stand up before the judges and hope that they won’t catch your lie. This is what I was advised to do by fellow lawyers. Alas, I wasn’t brave enough.

As a matter of principle though, I wanted to argue my case. And argue I did, for 20 months, which included six “interviews” with honorable members of the esteemed committee. The committee was reconstituted several times within this span of time, but what remained constant was a stubborn resistance to change, lack of awareness and absolute inability to listen to the other.

It is of no consequence that I passed the New York State Bar Exam, one of the hardest in the US. The only question the committee was concerned with was why I didn’t have an LLB. It kept coming up in each of the grueling meetings that I was made to suffer through. I don’t have an LLB because I wasn’t convinced that A’ Levels was an advanced enough level of education to make up my mind about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

The American system of education always made more sense to me so I decided to go to the US for higher education. I graduated from a law school that gave me the opportunity to represent actual clients as part of clinical legal education. Law school here, with few exceptions, offers little skill-building and almost no practical tools. Most law students here have never seen the inside of a courtroom. I would be surprised if any of them knew how to deal with a live client. There is almost no mention during the course of their legal education of the most important person of all — the unfortunate soul whose life and liberty is at stake, the one who will spend his/her life’s savings on hiring a lawyer.

Here’s what I think. I think that all law school teaches you how to do is look up the law. Nobody has the treatises or criminal and civil procedure codes memorised. Law is actually very commonsensical and sometimes I think this is what leads to the deep insecurity inherent in this profession. What if the common man/woman saw through this façade? What if they decided this was easy enough for them to figure out on their own? What if they stopped paying me legal fees?

I just wasted two years of my legal career waiting for a license that I didn’t actually need because it is easy and common to cheat the system or buy your way through it. I am annoyed because I could have spent these two years arguing matters of national importance like the right to education, the release of Pakistani prisoners from Indian prisons and the constitutional rights of religious minorities in Pakistan — all issues that I am committed to, but was prevented from influencing. Fear of retribution, of getting off to a bad start with the judges, held me back from filing a writ petition.

There is in fact existing precedent where JD degree holders were granted exemption from the two-year apprenticeship. The 2006 oft-cited judgment on the issue makes no mention of a JD and therefore does nothing to overturn existing precedent. I have been told in private by judges who are familiar with legal education in other parts of the world, how ridiculous all this is, and how they wish they could help. Here’s one way in which you can help. Maintain the status quo. That ought to discourage people like us from wasting our time in a system that is not ready for any real change.

The writer, a partner at a private law agency, is the head of the Street Law Clinic at Quaid-i-Azam Law College.maryamarif@hotmail.com