Thistles Never Beget Pickles: Is Legal Education in Pakistan Toeing the Right Direction?

Abstract

Pakistan Bar Council Rules 2015 standing on the shoulders of the honorable Supreme Court of Pakistan finally got implemented in letter and spirit. The inflow of aspirant lawyers was curtailed assumingly, on the principle of demand and supply by making the passage to the profession narrower and longer (only100 students for 5 years/university). The step is to deal with one side of the problem i.e., overcrowding of the professional stream. The other and more important aspect of the problem is the declining standards of legal education. The steps taken to improve this aspect also invited further exploratory research. The research mainly seats in social constructivism where ontology-epistemology difference is minimum. The methodology is hermeneutic dialectical which contemplates the active role of the researcher in observing and comparing one phenomenon in various systems to suggest a solution. The method used is content analysis. The phenomenon of legal education is analyzed and compared in currently available models of legal education in Pakistan. In this context, the comparison is made between LL. B. five years semester (S) programme with five years annual programme (A). The findings are two-sided, one is that these two programmes do not synchronize regarding the content of the programmes, the content added in the semester programme to groom the student’s experiential learning through research; while advocacy skills are absent in the annual-based programme. Second is that such content though has been added in the semester programme, lacks an assortment of any standardized skillset required to be developed in the aspirants. In addition, no quantifiable assessment standards have been required or provided to assess the skillset acquired by the law students. The suggested remedy is to assort the skillset first and then develop tools to standardize their assessment. It could be done by developing a teaching methodology having a connection between the pedagogy (means) and the skillset (ends) to uplift the standards of legal education. The required skillset could be developed on an experiential/clinical model available in neighboring and advanced countries.