Lexpert

Indian students are to examinations what Aussie cricketers are to cricket – practiced, professional and passionate. Indians take exams all their lives – many of us were examined before we entered nursery school and have never stopped being examined ever since. We take exams to get into school, we take exams while we’re in school, we take exams to get past school. Then we take exams to get into universities, exams to get into graduate institutions, exams to join the civil services and other government jobs and in some cases, exams to get promoted. The average Indian student takes an exam with the same ease that Michael Schumacher took those tight turns in Monaco.

So what difference does one more exam make? Especially when it’s an exam about stuff you’ve spent five years studying? Quite a lot, when that exam decides whether you get to get a job, follow your passion or even just be recognized as a qualified professional. That’s the importance of the new All India Bar Exam.

Most developed jurisdictions require lawyers to take a bar exam of some kind. And in almost every jurisdiction that imposes a bar exam, there exist teachers or preparation classes to take students past the bar exam. This is a curious phenomenon. If law students train for the bar exams through special classes, then what on earth do they learn during their time in law school?

For example, every single one of the subjects tested on the Multistate portion of US bar exams (which applies no matter which state’s bar you take), is taught as part of the basic curriculum for US law schools. So why should law students need to take separate classes for the bar exam? The simple answer is because the law is vast and memory is limited. Even a diligent student is likely to forget the finer points of the legal principles he studied three years ago, in the absence of continuous practice and familiarity. Quick test – offhand, can you name the four cases in which culpable homicide constitutes murder under the Indian Penal Code?

So that’s what bar classes do – they ensure familiarity with the basics, they allow you to take practice tests and they teach you to manage your time in an exam situation. What law schools teach you is very different – they teach you to think about problems like professional lawyers, they teach you long-term skills such as reading and distinguishing cases and how to draft effectively. At least, that’s what law schools are supposed to do – many don’t seem to take these responsibilities sufficiently seriously.

US law schools consciously do not teach with the bar exam in mind. A single course on criminal law might focus on murder and rape and consciously decide not to teach areas such as kidnapping, arson or robbery. Some professors may teach courses entirely from their point of view or with a single theme in mind – for instance Constitutional law might focus on restraints on government action or on federalism. The focus is on learning to think about the law – the nitty- gritties of specific statutes may be left to bar preparation.

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