Free legal help, closer to the courtroom: BHU's law faculty ties up with the judiciary

Banaras Hindu University's Faculty of Law is building a working partnership with the judiciary, and the people who should feel the difference first are the ones who cannot afford a lawyer. Under the plan placed before the university administration by Prof. Pradip Kumar Singh, head and dean of the faculty, BHU's long-running Legal Aid and Services Clinic will widen its pro-bono work, and law students will spend more of their course inside real courtrooms. Structured court visits and internships with practising advocates are to sit alongside the clinical legal education the faculty has taught since the 1970s, when very few Indian universities were doing it at all. For Varanasi, the practical meaning is simple. A free legal-aid clinic staffed by students under faculty supervision is one of the few places in the city where somebody with a stalled pension, a property tangle or a case they do not understand can get an hour of qualified attention without paying a fee. Widening it means more of those hours, and closer contact with the courts where the cases actually sit. The clinic already has a record beyond the campus gate: its public-interest work in 2017 on the daily wages paid to prisoners led the Uttar Pradesh government to revise them. The faculty also points to strong recent showings in national law-school rankings for value for money. Tying a fifty-year teaching tradition to the working judiciary, rather than keeping it inside the seminar room, is the whole point of the new arrangement.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: Amar Ujala