Aims Of The Legal Education

The prime object of legal education is to produce professional lawyers. The term ‘professional lawyer’ does not only cover the ‘litigating, lawyer, viz.,’ the lawyer who argues before the ordinary courts but all persons trained in law, whose employment is mainly dependent on their degrees in law.

The committee of legal education of the Harvard Law School lays emphasis on double purpose of a law school
(1) To train men for the legal profession, and
(2) To provide a centre where scholars might contribute to an understanding of law and government and participate creatively in their growth and improvement.

Mr. Dean Wright of the University of Toronto suggested three objectives of a law school:
(a) education in the qualities that should be found in a legal practitioners,
(b) education which would train a man not merely in the work of solving problems of individual clients but of the society in which he lives, and
(c) To act as a centre of research and criticism and contribution to the better understanding of the laws by which societies are held together.

Lord Denning in his address to the society of Public Teachers of Law expressed three purposes of legal education:
(1) to show how legal rules have developed, the reasons underlying them and the nexus between legal and social history,
(2) To extract the principles underlying the existing legal rules, and
(3) To point the right road for future development.

Dr. Mohammad Farogh in his observations on legal education in a modern civilized society wants to include the following aims and objectives: 
(1) to inculcate students with the operative legal rules, both substantive and procedural,

(2) to provide the students with adequate experience to apply these rules,

(3) to equip the students with sufficient knowledge of the historical an sociological background of the country’s legal system,

(4) to provide the students with some knowledge of the other legal system of the world so that the students do not find themselves at a complete loss when it comes to adopting a comparative approach,

(5) Very significantly, the students should be encouraged to participate in discussions, seminars and challenge the very premise of legal concepts and their applications.

Legal education should aim at furnishing skills and competence, the basic philosophies and ideologies for creation and maintenance of just society.It must sensitize society to identify its problems and ensure social and economic justice through rule of law and to eradicate injustice, poverty, corruption and nepotism from the society. The legal education stands for enhancement of human sensibility and injects a sense of protecting human liberty and equality before law. The curriculum of legal education should be thought of in terms of its objectives.

Andrew J. Pirie has suggested that the process of systematic instructional design may involve four important steps:
(1) Performance Analysis – it lays emphasis on the identification of instructional goals, which are needed by the consumers of legal education. It can be used as a mechanism to determine whether, there is an important difference between what someone is already able to do and what it is intended for him to be able to do, and , if an important difference does exist, whether instruction or some other course of action is appropriate. Objective is what the student will learn.

(2) Task analysis is an earnest attempt to identify exactly what the student needs to know or do to achieve the goal. It is a careful description of what the competent person does or is supposed to do when he or she is doing job.

(3) Skill analysis spells out a deice to identify the steps which a person is required to undertake to achieve the goal. It involves information skills, intellectual skills or psychomotor skills. The skill analysis breaks down each of these identified steps into its component part. But if the steps involve higher-level intellectual skills, such as application, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation, the skills analysis becomes more complex. Skills analysis can involve the production of a very larger list of necessary behaviors, depending upon the task.

(4) Writing performance analysis is the stage where both the instructor and the student are able to understand what a person must know or be able to do to accomplish his task.