M. P. RAMASWAMY
Legal profession as a calling mandates various fundamental traits essential for discharging its imperative mission of upholding justice. Conventionally, the pathway of entering the legal practice transcended beyond formal law school education that encompassed pre-law preparatory education, post-graduation vocational training and the post professional licensing, consisting of continuing legal education. While the law schools primarily focused on legal knowledge acquisition, the tasks of training in legal skills and competences were spread across different stages of the professional path. Legal education needs at all stages never stayed static due to the constant evolution in the requirements of access to justice in the society and the ever-changing landscape of legal practice. In this constant state of flux, taking stock of demands of the profession and the society and assessing the vitality of the legal education in meeting the demand gains significance. Such an assessment, based on a rubric reflecting the emerging professional and societal needs, should be able to determine reforms required for the legal education to remain efficacious. The paper aims to assess key competences prescribed by professional bodies to demonstrate that any assessment of legal education should transcend beyond such prescription. The paper establishes the relevance of certain desirable skills for any legal education reforms and emphasizes the need to draw from reform initiatives in other jurisdictions. The paper investigates two common law jurisdictions of USA and Singapore to distinguish the causes and the resulting recommendations for the legal education reforms. How far the findings emerging from the comparative study would be of utilitarian for other jurisdictions aiming to assess legal education and undertake reforms is presented in the conclusion.