Thursday, July 27, 2006

Crazyfinger writes

"Be that as it may, it appears to me that, while our eye is on the ball for the impressive economic growth in the years to come, nothing noteworthy is happening on the law front. I haven’t read a single article or a news report that seriously talked about legal reforms, commensurate with economic reforms. Why is that? We occasionally read business community (international) complaining about the legal impediments to establishing scale businesses in India, but no response is reported. How is it that we embrace with so much enthusiasm our own economic boom while riding on the coattails of U.S. business world, but show no interest in the supreme U.S. legal system? If push comes to shove, I’d take the boom in legal reform anyday, over the boom in the economic reform. Puzzling. So I wanted to dig into history and try to figure out what is our legal tradition, what is its status now, and why is it that legal professionals don’t seem to participate in the social commentary.

All that and more I found in a gem called “Professor Kingsfield Goes to Delhi: American Academics, the Ford Foundation, and the Development of Legal Education in India” by Professor Jayanth Krishnan of William Mitchell College of Law (free download). Once in a while, when you are looking for something, it feels like all the answers are hidden in plain view already, lurking and springing forward as soon as you form the right question in the right way. This paper feels like one of those springing forward answers, if you are looking to understand what is happening to the state of legal education in India.

Writing with simple clarity is a hard-earned skill - a long and arduous labor before it becomes “natural” (or “intuitive”) - and deserves a premium appreciation by itself. Not only this approximately 55-page document written with an illuminating clarity, but it also reads like a Dashiell Hammett page-turner."
See http://www.crazyfinger.org/2006/03/its_the_law_not.html#comments
I ditto his sentiments.

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