PIL in Delhi HC seeks directions to Centre to constitute Legal Education Commission

New Delhi: A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has been moved in Delhi High Court seeking direction to the central government to constitute a Legal Education Commission on Tuesday.
The PIL has sought to constitute an LEC similar to the Medical Education Commission comprising retired judges, law professors and lawyers to ascertain the feasibility of four-year Bachelor of Law course like BTech.
The plea moved by Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, a practising lawyer and BJP leader stated that the court may also direct the Bar Council of India to constitute an expert committee of Retired Judge(s), jurist and educationists to examine the coherence of five years' Bachelor of Law Course with new education policy 2020.
"Direct the Expert Committee to prepare a report on the essentiality of a BA, BBA, or BCom before BLaw, which is also a graduation course," stated the plea.
The plea further stated that the new education policy 2020 promotes four-year graduation courses but BCI has neither reviewed the five-year BA-LLB nor started the four-year B-Law to date. BTech through IIT takes 4 years of non-superfluous education and that too in a specified field of engineering whereas BA-LLB or BBA-LLB through the NLU and various other affiliated colleges consumes 5 years of a student's precious life while providing knowledge of Arts/Commerce, an unrelated and superfluous stream. Hence, the existing five-year course is manifestly arbitrary and irrational.
The lengthy and exorbitant course is disincentivizing students from pursuing law. The extraordinary and poor students are rather pursuing engineering, civil services or other courses. BA and LLB or BBA and LLB are both graduation courses and thus there is no need for both in a student's career. Annual fees of a five-year course are comparatively greater than that of a four-year course, the plea said.
Earlier, there was a three-year B-Law course after the 12th Standard. Former Law Minister late Ram Jethmalani started practising law at the age of 17 years and legend of the Bar late Fali Nariman at the age of 21 years, plea added.
"Today, the total lifespan has decreased from 100 to 80 years, and the voting age has been reduced from 21 to 18 years. People are maturing earlier with respect to their age. A four-year law course will be better equipped for the young generation. The present five-year BLaw has been designed for extracting money and the most egregious part is that such dirty work is being done in the name of education. A five-year course is no benchmark for judging the legal expertise of any student," the plea read.