Legal Education To Lay Down Foundations, Not Raise Walls: A Response To Litigation-Centred Training

This piece responds to Dr. S. A. Thameemul Ansari's column piece, “Reclaiming the Soul of Legal Education: A Case for Litigation-Centred Training,” which articulates a familiar frustration within legal academia: that years spent training students in the discipline of law are ultimately “wasted” when graduates move into corporate roles. Of evidence law to produce smoking gun; of procedural law in choreographing a trial; of drafting plaints and applications under the CPC; and of arguing before judges with Dworkin's integrity, the lament is that these hard-taught skills are abandoned at the doors of corporate offices.

Yet beneath this critique lies a louder and more troubling assumption: that legal education exists only for courtroom practice. This locational orthodoxy that “real law” resides exclusively in courts, and that authentic legal skill is exercised only before a judge rest on an impoverished imagination of law, confined to statutes, judgments, and, at best, court craft. It produces a structural dichotomy that treats litigation as a noble pursuit of justice and corporate practice as little more than a mercenary exercise in billing hours.

This opposition is false. Litigation is not a pure sanctuary of justice, nor is corporate practice merely an exercise in transactional drudgery. Each occupies its own market space, and practitioners move between them with far greater fluidity than the conventional “litigation versus corporate” binary allows. What unites them is a shared terrain of foundational legal skills that legal education must map and cultivate, instead of erecting silos of advocacy training versus corporate training, or worse, ignoring careers that fall outside this artificial divide.

At its core, legal education is about rephrasing and delayering justice; uncovering law beyond official sources; understanding the movement of power; cultivating legal foresight and making critical decisions through sound reasoning. This vision of law graduate is about shaping a legal personality that does not merely speak of the law, but speaks to it. This vision may appear quixotically ambitious or dissuadingly philosophical, but it traces the very boundaries through which law operates across fields. The same tools animate successful graduates who move into public policy, bureaucracy, academia, social action, or institutional leadership domains where legal reasoning is extracted from its conventional confines and applied with equal, if not greater, consequence.

In uncovering law beyond official sources, it becomes clear that no sector is governed by a single, closed constitutional rulebook. Corporate governance, for instance, is continuously reshaped by SEBI, RBI, and other regulators, alongside market practices and commercial norms. Legal competence here lies in identifying practices that can be argued into standards of care, skill, foresight, and diligence whether for a leading supplier performing contractual obligations or a company navigating regulatory compliance. Meanwhile, a junior in a district court must know that Ahmad not the bare text of procedure may be indispensable in navigating court practice. Both are exercises in locating law where it actually operates.

Understanding the movement of power is equally indispensable. While not central to every legal vocation, it is foundational to social activism and public lawyering, where rights and duties are often buried beneath technicalities and procedural evasions. No Public Interest Litigation survives without pushing rights beyond officially allocated blocks and clarifying public duties rendered opaque in performance. The corporate world, too, is far from homogenous or inert; every clause in a Share Purchase Agreement embodies a shift in power that only a critically trained lawyer can apprehend.

Rephrasing justice is not confined to eloquent appeals in property disputes or arguments defending adverse possession. It also lies in drafting robust agreements that become the mother documents when contracts are frustrated, extinguished, or breached. Delayering operates differently in each context, yet its logic persists even when a legally trained homemaker navigates the shifting roles of state, market, and family through critical legal consciousness.

A graduate truly speaks to the law when they understand foreseeability not merely through the confines of the “reasonable person” standard, but beyond it that is, when they recognise how precedents cut across one another mid-argument and learn to defend, with precision, the inarguability of distinguishable facts. The same sensibility appears in the foresight of a policy framer who understands that an increase in Floor Area Ratio decided a municipal corporation may be prone to tectonic vulnerabilities of that city and not merely as an exercise of jurisdiction by the corporation.

Legal education, therefore, is about cultivating the foresight and reasoning required to make educated decisions that may never crystallise into decrees, yet are no less “good judgment calls”. It cannot afford an unflinching loyalty to advocacy as the sole authentic form of legal practice. The moment of reflection must come from within legal institutions themselves: to design curricula and pedagogies that train leaders across fields, rather than reproducing law within the narrow precincts of courtrooms and law firms.

One measure of such reform lies in locating methodologies that move beyond the rote learning of precedents and the mechanical dictation of statutes. National and international scholarship across disciplines often presents legal cases from a bird's-eye view, situating courtroom reasoning within its real-world implications. Yet even in premier legal institutions, advances such as AI risk reducing this richness to clickable 200-word summaries, marked by dry and superficial engagement with the contexts surrounding legally bound texts. Cross-disciplinary pedagogical approaches, particularly those inspired by the social sciences, offer a meaningful recourse.

For instance, Scandinavian scholarship in legal geography has opened new ways of cartographing new sources of law. By surfacing the contours of legality beyond formal texts, popular songs and folk music emerge not merely as subjects of intellectual property, but as early expressions of customary practices that attain legal character through their longevity and social reach. Similarly, drawing inspiration from dramaturgical schools of sociology, I experimented with teaching jurisprudence by treating doctrinal schools as scripts rather than notes. Students orated each school through the voices of relatable contemporary actors grappling with present-day issues. Performed in pairs, these exercises helped students develop confidence in engaging with ideology, followed by reflective discussions from the perspectives of the characters inhabiting those dialogic exchanges.

Innovation, coupled with consistency in pedagogical development, expands the territory of legal training and releases legal education from merely producing market-ready products whether for litigation or corporate practice. In this vision, the law graduate is not an artist confined to a single theatre, but a director capable of staging plays in theatres of their own choosing.