Dr. Sophie Sparrow, Professor of Law at New Hampshire School of Law and currently teaching at National Law University Jodhpur, speaks to Bar & Bench about Indian law students, the benefits of a law degree and what one should expect from a sound, legal education.

Bar & Bench: Thank you for speaking to Bar & Bench. Could you tell us a little bit more about yourself? What brings you to National Law University Jodhpur (NLUJ)?

Sophie Sparrow: I am a Professor of Law from the New Hampshire School of Law. I am at NLUJ on a Fulbright and arrived here a few weeks ago.

I am co-teaching torts with another colleague and I have been giving some guest lectures. I will also be giving a series of writing workshops for LLM students and I recently took a class on giving oral presentations. A portion of the Human Resources curriculum shall also be taught by me.

I will be at NLUJ till the semester ends in June.

Bar & Bench: Why did you decide to choose NLUJ?

Sophie Sparrow: When I got a Fulbright, I decided to teach for a semester in India. So NLUJ was one of the schools I was looking at and I wrote to a number of schools, many of the NLU's but I did not hear back from from some of them.

I chose Jodhpur, in part, because it was a relatively newer school. But the other thing I liked was diversity in faculty. I was looking at institutes that had younger faculty, more women faculty etc. I was also looking at the program of instruction because my speciality is in teaching and learning techniques. And so I was interested in a school that was interested in developing innovative teaching and learning techniques, and not one that was going to say “We have been doing this way for a hundred years and so we are going to keep doing it”

I really liked what I had heard about NLUJ from different people. Another Fulbrighter who was here last year told me that he had had a really good experience at Jodhpur and that NLUJ was more entrepreneurial. I have not been to other law schools but he had and he said that some of the older, more established law schools were less entrepreneurial. According to him, the older law schools were less keen on exploring new avenues, you know, be it teaching subjects or writing publications or putting up new centres etc.

So that appealed to me. That spirit of “Let's see how we can make this better”.

Bar & Bench: What are your initial impressions of NLUJ?

Sophie Sparrow: Lets start with the students first right? I do what I do because I care about the students. I think the students are great. They are really smart and they are very engaged.

What I have found here is that the students are very bright and if you give them a problem, they are really interested in engaging. For example, recently I was teaching them about vicarious liability and so I gave them an example from a case. And I said, "Do you think in these circumstances, this bicycle courier is a servant or an independent contractor?" I divided the class into half, one would argue for the plaintiff and the other for the defendants and they were just great!

So they came up and they had really good arguments, they were thoughtful, they named their assumptions, they used the facts and they were really engaging with each other. Many of the US students are not as articulate and not as good at voicing their opinions and arguments off the top of their head.

It is a different culture here though. In the US for example, there is an expectation that everyone would have done a lot of reading before they come to class. And so the class is all about the discussion about the reading. In many classes, you will get called on and you have to be ready. And most people are ready most of the time. There are fewer contact hours but students have to do a lot of work outside class. And here we have more class room hours so students end up spending more time within the class room so there are bound to be differences.

Bar & Bench: Coming back to your decision to teach at NLUJ, do you think that information on law schools in India is easily available? How did you do your research on Indian law schools?

Sophie Sparrow: In the Fulbright process, you have to apply two years ahead of time. And so [when I first planned to come to India] I just kept visiting [Indian law school] websites and honestly, you get what you can get out of the website and a few other things but that is about it. There is limited information and you don't know how accurate any of it is. It sort of felt like looking for needles in a haystack.

So what I had to do was contact people who had been doing Fulbrights in India and ask them what they knew about law schools, the curriculum, the administration, the faculty etc. It really was like working a network.

But this was an interesting experience for me because in the US, all law schools have a website. And they invest pretty heavily in websites because that is the primary interface. We know students don’t read the “View Book” (brochures/catalogues), they look at the website. So all websites will have contact information.

With many of the law schools here, however, you just cannot find out how to contact people. This is compounded by the fact that, because it is a different administrative structure, one does not know whether, for example, one should be contacting the VC or the Registrar.

So, to conclude, it is really hard to find information [on law schools] about anything really. There is some stuff but there could be so much more.

Bar & Bench: Do you develop your own course here? Is there a lot of freedom within the curriculum?

Sophie Sparrow: So the process here is that they have course developers; somebody else sets the curriculum for the entire semester. The books are already set; the key cases are already set and the topics are already set. But there is a lot of flexibility about your teaching methodology within this.

And so when I was asked to help teach torts and law of compensation, I was working with this other teacher and we divided the modules between ourselves.

Bar & Bench: Did you find this pre-decided curriculum a bit restrictive?

Sophie Sparrow: Actually, this is one of the things I think is a huge improvement as compared to American legal education. Because in the US, in most law schools, there is so much autonomy that if you and I both take a torts class but we are in different sections, we might possibly end up learning completely different things. And there is no accountability in such matters.

Some schools have started to say that that is really not fair. So that if you go to one class you should not just learn about theory but you should also learn about elements, and applying facts in another class. There has to be a core understanding.

I think there are ways in which it [pre-defined curriculum] could be even better and we need to do this in the US as well. For example, we need to not just focus on coverage (what is the course going to “cover” or disseminate) but what is it that the students should be able to learn and how do you know that they have learnt it.

So another good thing about this school is that they have these continuous assessments, actually five different assessments in a semester.

Bar & Bench: Don’t you think that is a lot: five exams, multiple projects and then an end-semester exam? Do you think that is unfair on the student?

Sophie Sparrow: It is a lot but I don’t think the concept [of continuous assessment] is unfair. Like the literature on teaching and learning is that people prepare if they have a test or if they are going to be graded.

Just by way of contrast, in many US law schools, there is only one exam at the end. So you do the reading for four months and then you take an exam. Maybe a month later, you find out how you did and [often] there is no connection. You might think you are doing just fine and then you get a bad mark.

Having continuous assessments allows you to say “Oh this is what I am getting and this is what I am not”. It gives you a chance for coaching, for intervention etc. and it tells you where you stand. So, I think it’s a really good model.

Having said that though, I think the method [of continuous assessment] could be better. Ideally, the whole faculty should get together and figure out what they are trying to assess. For instance, how much writing do students need? Do they need writing assignments in every course? Or should there be different kinds of writing for different course and perhaps have moot court arguments for some courses. There are all these different skills but you don’t have to repeat them all in every course.

The other thing you need to do is to figure out the schedule so it’s not like one day you have three tests and then for two weeks you have nothing. It should be spread out.

So in conclusion, I think that the notion of continuous assessment is a great idea but the method could be improved.

Bar & Bench: In the US, law is a post-graduate degree while here it is offered at the undergraduate level. Is there a lot of difference between Indian and US students, say just in terms of age and everything which comes along with it?

Sophie Sparrow: I think it’s not so much the age. Like I was saying, I think these students are pretty talented. They have done well in tests, they have done well in high school and they are smart students.

Having said that though, here in India you have to take CLAT and then you have to go to law school immediately. You can't postpone it. Some of our best [US] students in law are students who have who have first gone to college, then worked for a while and by the time they go to law school, they know that they want to be lawyers and they are willing to work really hard.

And the reason why this is important is because law school is hard work and it can get tedious. A lot of the reading is….. kind of boring you know (laughs), it is not really for everybody. And if you are really not sure about what you want to do then it might get difficult.

Many 18-year olds have no idea what they want to do but [in India] there is no time for them to work for a firm, work for the government or work for a judge and get a feel of what they are going to do if they become a lawyer.

So, while Indian students bring great thinking skills, good memorisation skills and are very articulate, they don’t have the same depth of experience. And I think that is the difference between under-graduate and [post-graduate students.

Bar & Bench: Moving on to a broader topic, why do you think anyone should study law?

Sophie Sparrow: I think there are a number of reasons why people should study law. For one thing, many people equate learning law as another great version of liberal arts because it does teach you critical thinking skills, close examination of text etc.

If you can do well in law school, you come out with a systematic and analytic approach. You can get this in other disciplines but you definitely get it in law, you can really hone it while studying law.

I think that this analytical approach is transferrable to many other areas. So for example, in the US, the graduate degree that the vast majority of Broadway show producers have is a law degree. Now who would think that Broadway show producers would have a law degree?

But the skills they picked up in law school were helpful skills. They went up through the business ranks, they understand personnel issues, they understand the creative side and they understand the money side.

So, what I tell students is that it [law] is an incredibly diverse degree. If you have the luxury and the resources to take it on, it is a great experience.

Bar & Bench: Law schools in India are fairly expensive and this means that a large section of people simply opt out of studying law for this reason alone. This means that the student community is fairly homogenous. Is that a problem in the US as well? Are there any solutions for this?

Sophie Sparrow: Oh yes, it is a huge problem in the US.

I think of the ways to resolve this is to reach out to communities while they are still in high school. Not just before when they graduate but before that. And tell them what a law degree is like and what it can do for them. They should be told about the different careers, jobs, professions one can engage in if one does take up law.

You have to start at the high school level or at the community college level. You have to empower people to think about the idea. You can’t just say “Oh you can apply to law college.” but you have to show them what they can do with a law degree and make them believe that they can do it.

In the US we have a much lower percentage of black Americans who are in law and people have really been working on it. But it is a Catch-22 situation because you don't see that many senior, managing lawyers who are blacks. And you don’t see that many black students in law schools, with a few exceptions.

When I went to law school, there were very few women there. And if you don't see anybody who looks like you, you begin to think “maybe I don’t belong here” you know.

One of things law schools get credited on is diversity and access, so there paying a lot of attention to it. So it has gotten better but a lot of people are saying that you have to start early.

Bar & Bench: One of the common concerns about CLAT is that it is unfairly biased towards those students who have been taught in the English medium. But at the same time, there are those who argue that command over the English language is a necessary skill set. What are your thoughts on this?

Sophie Sparrow: So one of the questions that the framers of the CLAT should ask themselves is “What are we screening for? What is the purpose of the admission test?” Because this changes every year, depending on who is holding the test and that does not make much sense.

With regard to the English bias, I agree that it [command over English] is an important skill. But why have that as an absolute barrier to let people in the door. I mean that doesn’t' seem fair.

What if you can separate the English performance versus the other performance such as thinking and logic, critical thinking etc? For those people whose English is not so good, rather than forcing them to go to school immediately, you have them provisionally admitted but they have to get additional work done to improve their English performance.

Or, you could let them into law school and in addition to their regular classes, they are provided with an intensive English instruction to get them up to speed. Or bring them in early for a couple of months to improve that aspect.

Lawyers are going to be the future leaders of any country and I definitely think [access] is an issue.

Lawyers have a lot of influence, they have a lot of credibility and it [law school] really should be open to a diverse perspective of people. I really believe that.

Bar & Bench: One last question: So say I am thinking about writing the CLAT but I have absolutely no idea what a legal education would provide. What should I to expect from the five years and what advice would you give me?

Sophie Sparrow: Well, I have only been here for three weeks so I can’t really speak on the five year course but I can tell you generally that in law you are going to develop a disciplined way of thinking about things and an analytical approach. You are going to be developing your writing skills, your presentation skills.

One of the things I advise any person who tells me that they are even thinking about going to law school is: talk to as many lawyers as you can. Go to the courthouses. Sit and watch judges. Find out what lawyers do in government. Because I think any job we do has to be a good match of our skills and interests and what the employer needs. And that is an individual thing. The research out there says that just because people pay you a lot of money, it might get you the job but it does not keep you there and this can be widely dissatisfying.

And so I tell people that if you think you want to be a lawyer or go to law school, you need to to educate yourself about the range of things that you can do with this degree. So that when you go into law school and it is hard and not fun, you are thinking “In five years this is what I want to do”, you have an end goal.

That is hard to do when you are seventeen though; most of us did not think about it this much. But I suppose that is the beauty of hindsight (laughs)

(Image taken from here)