State of legal research

Uttam Kumar Das

Legal education in Bangladesh has been experiencing a downslide despite the emerging global need for qualified lawyers. We also need lawyers with competitive legal knowledge and skills for our own legal and judicial system.

Lawyers’ professional scope now extends beyond a specific legal or national jurisdiction given the emerging work opportunities for transnational activities of legal professionals and practitioners in the area of business, trade, finance, transaction, arbitration, negotiation, intellectual property, human rights works, and jobs with international, inter-governmental and United Nations organizations.

Though we have been producing a huge number of law graduates every year, majority of them are under-qualified or non-qualified in terms of legal knowledge and skills in research, analysis, languages, and presentations and are falling behind in the global completion. Even we are far below our counterparts from India or Nepal.

The frustrating trend is better described as a “disastrous situation” by none other than the Chairman of the National Human Rights Com-mission and a renowned Law Professor Dr. Mizanur Rah-man in a recent interview with me.

This downward trend in legal education has been contributed by the obsolete and archival curriculum, traditional teaching and examination methods, lack of practical and clinical aspects in the curriculum, huge gap in relations between teachers and students, teachers’ engagement in outside activities, lack of interest, motivation, opportunity and skills for research and publications.

There is no standard-set -ting institution so far in this regard. Also, there is lack of public and private initiatives so far.

The scenario of legal research is also in a pitiable state. A handful of law schools at public and private universities offer courses on legal research and writing, and on clinical legal education. But these also lack standard and quality due to lack of resources (i.e., library materials, logistical and Internet facilities among others), skills and expertise of the respective faculty members.

Our faculty members are coming back with education and degrees from the developed countries; however, they are not taking any initiative to reform the legal education and introduce best practices out of their knowledge and learning.

The journals published by law schools at public universities (not regularly) rather follow a principle of “limiting knowledge.” For example, the Journal of the Faculty of Law at the University of Dhaka accepts articles only from their respective faculty members, as I am informed. This is also true of other public universities. This hardly happens in universities in other countries.

A journal is supposed to explore and disseminate new knowledge on a given subject. How will it assess its standard if there is no competitiveness in selecting or reviewing articles independently. Who will give a guarantee that only teachers could write “best articles”? These so-called journals are also not publicly available as I have experienced.

In the course of my recent affiliation for a year as a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School and Human Rights Center in Minneapolis, U.S.A., I found that three of their journals are being edited and published by only students (appointed by the schools on a rotation basis), alongside two others by faculty members, and two more jointly by faculties and students. The same I found in the case of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata, India.

Here, our professional, research and training institutions are also lacking in terms of performing their respective roles which also include quality research and publication.

The Bangladesh Bar Council and Law Commission neither has research and publication projects nor any journal. The Bangladesh Institute of Law and Internat-ional Affairs (BILIA) had its last issue of the biannual publication, Bangladesh Journal of Law in 2007. Though the Judicial Admini-stration and Training Insti-tute (JATI) has its own journal, it lacks professionalism and quality in publishing a research journal.

The writer is a human rights practitioner. He can be reached at udas1971@gmail.com

*Originally appered in the Daily Sun, 28 October 2010. Link: http://www.daily-sun.com/index.php?view=details&type=daily_sun_news&pub_no=23&menu_id=17&news_type_id=1&news_id=3923