Daily Times

A highly respected senior Justice on the Supreme Court Bench, famous for his quick wit and sharp repartee, once quipped in Court: “Counsel! The only thing that stands between your client and relief is you!”. Perhaps that remark best explains the sad state of legal affairs in our country. The single biggest hurdle in legal reforms, on all levels, is the legal fraternity!

According to ‘Canons of Professional Conduct and Etiquettes of Advocate’ a lawyer has four primary obligations: Conduct with other advocates, duty to clients, duty to the court and conduct with regard public generally. On all four counts; lawyers are guilty! An average civil matter in our courts, from the date of its institution to its final decree from the Supreme Court (and subsequent execution) is decided in 25 years. We have experimented with outsourcing criminal justice system to military courts — look how that’s turning out!

The justice project in Pakistan has failed to deliver not because of how we have written our laws (or adopted them), but due to what is referred to in Pakistan as ‘wukala-gardi’ for most part, there is little focus on building up of core legal values and inculcating legal ethics in our law schools as we churn out hundreds of lawyers every year. We don’t need so many lawyers. We need lawyers who understand and respect our honour code!

In the long run we have to fix our legal education system. At present, in Pakistan, there are two streams injecting lawyers into the legal fraternity. There are major issues with both. While students of external degrees are not introduced to the domestic jurisprudence, its procedural and substantive laws, the local degree on other hand, does not develop critical thinking.

In the long run, we have to fix our legal education system. At present, in Pakistan, there are two streams injecting lawyers into the legal fraternity. There are major issues with both. While students of external degrees are not introduced to the domestic jurisprudence, its procedural and substantive laws, the local degree on other hand, does not develop critical thinking

Our local law schools, with a handful exceptions, due to their archaic teaching methodology and assessments’ format, don’t develop a requisite skill necessary in students to identity and then apply the legal rule on facts and conclude accordingly. Students, by and large, develop key legal skills; research, drafting and advocacy, the hard way, in their initial years of practice. They would only learn, if they are fortunate enough to secure positions at good firms and chambers with well-meaning mentors; who are a dying breed today! Most importantly, their colossal failure has culminated in the rise of law schools offering expensive distance learning.

In the short term, a highly competitive bar entrance exam needs to be introduced followed up by a fitness interview. A Bar Exam should be structured, along the lines of Bar exams in London or California — with the level of difficulty progressively made harder over a period of time. This needs to be followed up with a professional and rigorous fitness interview aimed to assess candidates, among other things, on their antecedents also. Interview is highly important for entry into the legal profession all over the world. Candidates who clear the Bar exams don’t qualify as of right to practice. In Pakistan, however, fitness interview is merely a tea party, where young lawyers are picked up and recruited for future election campaigns.

While lawyers in the courts, Bar rooms and on media, feel entitled to criticise everything under the sun, there is no introspection. Our Bar Councils, apart from taking on the superior judiciary and closing deals with the executive, have done nothing for the uplift of the profession. Absent self-regulation — something we don’t believe in, we cannot save, of what is left, the prestige and reputation of our profession.

Yes, there is a need to review our civil and criminal procedure codes but even in their present form, if they are enforced in their letter, we can ensure access to affordable justice for all per the Constitutional mandate. But for that we need capacity building of our judges and lawyers.

This can only happen with a reformed legal education and corresponding overhaul of entry requirements into the profession — not through ad hoc measures. Pakistan has some of the most extraordinary legal brains who are recognised globally for their legal acumen (who have excelled in spite the system). We have the people and the capacity to inspire legal renaissance, one that stays and doesn’t wither with one man’s ambitions. The unfortunate part is — those with vision, capacity and good intent could care less: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity”.

Members of the Islamabad District Bar, having occupied the football ground in F-8 Sector in Islamabad; are now constructing chambers on the entire field reserved for children to play per the CDA’s master plan. While one rarely feels sorry for the rich neighbours; residents of Park Road are legitimately concerned about illegal occupation and expansion. One of them rhetorically asked the writer: Would you rather construct your next chamber on our driveways and lawns? “Well, if that is an invitation!”, I replied.

The writer attended Berkeley and is a Barrister of Lincoln’s Inn

Published in Daily Times, December 7^th 2017.