Supreme Court judge JK Maheshwari said on Thursday that the level of faculty in the national law universities should be improved to uplift the state of legal education in the country along with their standards.
Speaking at the Bharat Shiksha Summit 2025’s session on Legal Education and Training: Bridging Theory and Practice, Justice Maheshwari said practical legal training should also be improved upon and revitalised. In this context, he noted that moot court competitions are held regularly and should focus on real-world cases that land up in India’s courts instead of a corporate law case as is often the case with moot courts.
Referring to the ongoing debate on Artificial Intelligence, Justice Maheshwari said artificial intelligence is just that: artificial intelligence. Intelligence is natural and AI is man-made, he underlined. Speaking on the necessity of inculcating ethics, he said ethical training in legal education is its soul. While people cannot be trained in ethics since it comes with birth and basic nurturing, a sound moral base is required to be ethical, he said. Brushing away the abstract nature of the word ethics, he said it is a very real lived experience and needs to be built into legal professionals if they do not have it.
Ahead of Justice Maheshwari, Attorney General of India R. Venkataramani handled the questions put forward by National Law Institute University, Bhopal Vice-Chancellor Prof. (Dr.) S. Surya Prakash on the standardization of legal education by the Bar Council of India with disarming grace. The AG said law students should first of all understand where they intend to go in the social order that prevails in the country.
Venkataramani said law is a part of the social order and its students, throughout their lives, have to keep in mind the many divisions that exist in society including the economic ones. The Supreme Court of India is a mirror to Indian society and solves many of its problems that find their way to the courtroom.
He exhorted law students to ask themselves every minute if they and their work will make any difference to the world and of what kind, and continue to practice the self-questioning well into their careers.
Earlier, Prof. (Dr.) S. Surya Prakash had said legal education in India was coming up in three streams of law colleges, state law universities and national law universities. All three differ in terms of standards, quality, facilities and cost, he said. Thus, education has itself become a divisive force, he noted.
With such varying standards, Prof Surya Prakash appealed to the Bar Council of India to be strict and set standards since it equates the LLB degree given by all three streams at par.
National Law University Delhi Vice-Chancellor Prof GS Bajpai said the ball is in the BCI’s court to fix quality issues plaguing legal education. He made an earnest appeal to all universities to be liberal spaces that would allow students to exchange ideas, however frivolous they are, so that the campus is free from the rigor mortis of academic drudgery.
He said NLU Delhi has introduced a no-detention policy as an example of free-flow of ideas, and it is being examined for implementing in other NLUs. Prof Bajpai asked students to be active as citizens, especially in legal education.
Senior Advocate Pradeep Rai said English has played the role of a connecting language in India over time and said Hindi has not achieved that status because it has not made room for words from other languages. He said people over the last many decades have not used Hindi as an assimilatory language. On legal education, he said efforts should be made consciously to evolve and improve legal education despite the many roadblocks.
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