Historical Evolution of Legal Education in India

Abstract

Education though merely a word; but works as an instrument to transform a barbaric life into a meaningful life. Life is said to be dignified only if it is literate and civilised as per the norms of the society and genesis of the respective species, which is broadly divided in human and animal species. Human species is expected to be the most benevolent one, which represents the level of education too. Here level of education indicates the knowledge of universalism and righteousness of a specific situation in a particular society which is none other than the essence of law, justice and human rights.TheLegal education plays important role in developing and shaping the just and reasonable society in modern era.In the era of globalization and digitization the legal education has touched all aspects of human life. A world class institution may categorise as one where the education is provided in such a manner which can bring out the best among allstudents. The objective of a National Law University is to provide legal education which draws its resources and knowledge from wide variety of interdisciplinary research so that it is not just restricted to any one knowledge source. Legal education plays an important role in shaping just and reasonable society. The importance of legal education and research becomes more important, where lawyers and legal fraternity finds that the present law is not practical or sufficient for smooth functioning of the society. The main objective of the legal education must be to serve the need of the society. In order to achieve this objective the system of legal education has to adopt tocontinuously changing needs of the society. There is no doubt that that the system of legal education has witnessed multiple changes in the past and the purpose of those changes is to convert legal education socially relevant and professionally meaningful. In course of making structural reform in system of legal education, the tremendous increase in numbers of Law Colleges, Law Schools and Universities has been witnessed during last fifty years but the standard and quality of legal education still needsto be drastically improved. The system of National Law Universities which was initiated in the early nineties has shown some progressive transformation in the field of legal education but these law institutions can be categorised as the Institutions of elites.