Abstract:
The legal education in India during the health crisis was adversely impacted like any other education sector. The crucial question that had arisen in the Indian context include the digital divide and the need for digital inclusion. While the urban-based students could easily migrate to the digital model of the classroom with better infrastructure, the rural and marginalized students did face a major learning gap during the crisis. Outside the ambit of a handful of national law schools and elite private institutes, a large number of law colleges in India found themselves in difficulty to cope with sudden requirement to transform into digital mode. This paper highlights these issues.
Moreover, the question of experiential learning and its possibility of digital mode would be an important question for legal education systems all over the world to grapple with. Being a professional education course, legal education could be challenging to be imparted over the digital mode over an extended period. An analysis from the Indian context of how these challenges come up are analysed.
Apart from the stocktaking analysis the paper also attempts to highlight the learnings for Indian legal education from the crisis. An interesting trend that will be also analysed in the paper is regarding the possibility of using legal aid clinics as a learning and social responsibility tool by law schools during the crisis.
Speaker:
Dr. Deva Prasad M, Assistant Professor of Law, Humanities and Liberal Arts in Management Area, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, Kozhikode, Kerala, India
Deva Prasad. M currently holds Assistant Professor of Law position at Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode. His current research includes Contract Law, Alternate Dispute Resolution, IPR and Competition Regulation. He holds an LLM from National Law School of India University, Bangalore and Ph.D. from National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Prior to his present position, he worked as Assistant Professor in NLSIU, Bangalore. He has published research works in national and international journals (including Economic Political Weekly, Statute Law Review, Environmental Policy and Law, International Journal of Law and Information Technology). He has also contributed chapters to edited books.