The Bar Council of India, through mandatory practical training papers in the LLB syllabus, has tried introducing— with lesser degree of compulsion— public cause lawyering by students. This could have been an opportunity for law schools to introduce campus based legal services centres. However, what one observes is that the “practical training” is largely classroom based. This is usually attributed to the resource intensive nature of clinical education. But this is only a part of the story, as there is a huge demand from students to gather practical exposure evidenced in the students’ scramble for internships in commercial law firms/chambers. Thus, the problem has also been in translating the motivations of the modern law student and his anxiety for a desired career into an actionable model for university law clinic based legal aid delivery. This failure of the quasi-compulsory public lawyering regime naturally ought to have triggered a debate on the usefulness of compulsory public service. Instead,rather unfortunately, it has led to suggestions for a further step in the coercive spectrum that young lawyers be forced to perform public service on the verge of launching their careers. Is this “service before self” measure likely to work?

These measures will not work. Brute force should not be seen as the ultimate answer to all questions. Not the least in a democratic society. There are alternative policy tools available which can deliver the outcomes that the government desires. The task of regulation is to motivate people, with the right policy incentives, to voluntarily march in particular direction. Resorting to proscription type measure would imply that the government has finally acknowledged its failure to avert a crisis and in its task of governance and policy induced progress, which is not the case. However, a paradigm shift in planning legal aid through university law clinics is definitely needed. If one looks at the American case of university based legal aid initiatives, one finds that the legal aid and practical training have been decisively dis-associated. This disassociation corresponds to the drying up of funding for clinical legal education initiatives (similar to the practical training initiatives) and the universities being left on their own to fund the clinical legal education programmes. The lesson that this has for India is that the students’ goal of education—which in any case is the prime focus of practical training—will be the dominant driver of legal education. It is this value that the government will need to examine and propagate to create a successful and synergic campus based legal aid programmes. A very useful suggestion that was made by Justice DalveerBhandari (in Legal Aid and Clinical Education: A Challenge and An Opportunity) way back in the 1970s has yet not been incorporated in the policy framework of university based legal aid clinics. He opined: “training and experience with the legal problems of the non-poor is most essential… [and by] establishing legal services programme for the non-poor and accepting a fee for their services… law schools could provide their students with a comprehensive clinical education and fund legal aid clinics for the indigent”. This, he said, would expose students to the types of non-poor legal work that the student is more likely to engage with in his professional career for earning his livelihood and at the same time spare some funds for subsidising the poor persons’ legal needs.

Sometimes, swayed by the rhetoric of justice education goals of the university law clinic, people treat proposals for fee-earning university law clinics as illegitimate. While, there are other meritorious arguments for having a market based and competitive legal aid delivery mechanism as in the UK, here we will limit ourselves to suggesting that such objectors do not spot the contradiction in their argument. Those who vouch for justice education through university law clinics assume that due to the sensitisation in the pro-poor legal work the future professional will be willing to subsidise from his earning from non-poor legal practice his time and effort needed for legal aid. Why, would it then be not legitimate for university law clinics to blend legal aid with non-legal aid work? The way forward could lie in the suggestions by Justice Dalveer Bhandari, and to put those ideas into a concrete business model and examine whether a campus based law clinic will be able to leverage its student time into an ability to earn enough revenue to subsidise the legal services for the poor. Even while this is done, a large number of legal consultancy contracts of governments could provide some support to the initiative. This leads us to study the demand, supply and profitability of the legal professionals in India. These could be the new research agenda for the clinics and university law clinics can serve as useful laboratories for such socio-legal research.

In the contemporary context of self-sustained higher education, the potential of university law clinics to deliver legal services to the poor and justice education to the young lawyer can only be harnessed if the policy framework can create a win-win situation for all stakeholders. This requires a re-examination of the basic assumptions of the university based legal aid movement of the era where education was state subsidised and career options for law students were mostly limited to joining the bar. In today’s context, budding lawyers will hunt for knowledge base, exposure and skills sets that will propel them on the most lucrative of the career options before them and university based legal aid initiatives will only sustain and flourish if they meet these requirements of the law student and the basic expenditure of the legal services professionals is met. It seems unlikely that a quality legal service delivery mechanism for those in need of access to justice can be built on the edifice of the philanthropic students and professionals.