IN our eagerness to blame the mess, which the Indian justice administration system is currently faced with, on the judiciary, we frequently neglect to attribute the blame to where it rightly belongs – the lawyers.
The media of late has been reporting unhesitatingly incidents where lawyers have gone on the rampage, even on court premises. Images of ruffians wearing black coats and bands smashing furniture and clashing with the police have unfortunately become all too common on television.
It is not uncommon to find a mob of these “officers of the court” manhandling people accused of crimes in an apparent exhibition of moral outrage against their alleged heinous deeds. Each such report and each such unrestrained exhibition of hooliganism is acting as the proverbial additional nail in the coffin of the Indian judicial system.
Chief Justice SS Sodhi’s recent book “The Other Side of Justice” documents events which seem straight out of a Bollywood masala movie. The idea that lawyers affiliated to the Bar of one of the oldest high courts in the country could actually stampede and behave no better than common criminals, and with as much impunity, is shocking and ought to send alarm bells ringing everywhere.
The can of worms that the retired Chief Justice has opened is a clear signal that there is something terribly wrong with the way that we are training law students or calling them to the Bar.
In order to be called to the Bar in most “advanced” countries, a mere law degree is not considered sufficient. The entry barriers to the legal profession have been deliberately set sufficiently high as to preclude the entrance of any person unfit to participate in what is still regarded in those countries as a noble profession.
Legal education imparted in most law colleges in India is in itself shameful. “Professors” of law who have not published a single academic paper after having managed to get employed, or whose predated knowledge of the law is woefully inadequate, teach students only theoretical aspects of law. There is no forum or institute, nor any course or specialised training which a student has to undergo in order to make the transition from a law graduate to a lawyer.
The issuance of a law licence by the Bar Council too is a mere formality. There is no requirement for a law graduate to acquire any advocacy skills, to learn court etiquette or manners, or even have any knowledge of the law. If a person has been awarded an LL.B. degree by a university, he has the right to appear even before the Supreme Court of India the same day he gets his law licence.
Incredible as that may seem, it is nothing in comparison to the fact that Bar Councils like the Bar Council of Punjab and Haryana have also implemented a “tatkal” scheme for obtaining a law licence. If you pay an extra three thousand rupees on top of the six or seven thousand rupees normally charged, you are guaranteed your law licence within 24 hours.
A scheme enacted some years ago by the Bar Council required fresh law graduates to work with established lawyers for a year before being awarded the licence – and was predictably met with a huge outcry from the Bar as well as from the student community and was abandoned soon afterwards.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, to see ill-trained law students, bred on a diet of ridiculous courtroom scenes in trashy movies and professing motivation by reports of the so-called “public interest litigation” appearing in newspapers, making a mockery of the law.
The legal system in India is not a creation of a year or a dozen years ago. Despite all the criticism we may level against the English, we have, as a matter of fact, inherited a legal system with roots which go back hundreds of years. For a lawyer to ignore the historical legacy of the English system and its (usually) high traditions, especially those governing the conduct of lawyers, is to reduce the system to a pitiable condition.
For the most part, we lawyers are to blame for the common man’s creeping disillusionment with the legal system. Unfortunately, a bad lawyer makes for an even worse judge and in turn is responsible for a further corruption of the legal ethos.
Chief Justice Sodhi’s book is an unusually honest and candid admission by an insider of the ills that plague the legal system. The situations he recounts are being re-enacted across the country on a daily basis and the actors he names can be found in one form or another, professing leadership of bar associations and councils everywhere.
It is high time that a concerted effort is made to restore the dignity of this system, the honesty of character and the idealism of law students.
IN our eagerness to blame the mess, which the Indian justice administration system is currently faced with, on the judiciary, we frequently neglect to attribute the blame to where it rightly belongs – the lawyers.
The media of late has been reporting unhesitatingly incidents where lawyers have gone on the rampage, even on court premises. Images of ruffians wearing black coats and bands smashing furniture and clashing with the police have unfortunately become all too common on television.
» Read more: Dispensing justice – Lawyers to blame for judicial mess
