MONDAY ESSAY: Empowering Justice Through Education: Why Better Legal Education Matters

Introduction

Justice is the constant and perpetual desire to give every man his due.

Legal education can and should contribute to the attainment of better justice. Both legal competence and the capacity of people, including lawyers, to make moral judgments and minister justice in a wider sense are essential to justice. Access to justice, being a fundamental human right, remains a distant dream for many. One crucial factor contributing to this gap is the lack of legal knowledge and awareness amongst citizens. Better legal education can bridge this divide by empowering individuals to understand their rights, navigate the legal system and demand accountability from duty-bearers. By equipping people with legal knowledge, a culture of justice, equality and human rights is promoted. Legal education also enhances the capacity of justice sector actors to uphold the rule of law and protect human rights. The author argues that better legal education is essential for promoting access to justice for all and building a more just and equitable society. Effective legal education can have a transformative impact, fostering a culture of justice and human rights. 

What justice really is?

Every legal system or profession must have the element of ministering to justice, in that it should champion standards of consistency, equality, predictability and procedural fairness towards a just society. That is what justice is and means. Legal education should ensure that students develop both the capacity to make soundly based value judgments and their own sense of justice and not just one imposed on them by their teachers or the leaders of the legal profession, though justice must take account of the traditional and cultural context. Ministering to justice constantly requires an input of fresh views because society is driven by a combination of tradition and forces of change. Not all law students will end up becoming practising lawyers in the traditional sense, though most will do some kind of legal work throughout their lives. Thus, legal education must be geared to ensure that law students become key figures in ensuring that there is more and better justice. What society demands in terms of justice cannot be determined only by lawyers. Justice, as a social construct, is the result of a series of political, cultural, historical and moral legal influences. Lawyers should develop the ability, not only to understand and apply laws but also, to be sensitive to popular and social messages of discontent which suggest that laws and official behavior may not meet standards of justice.

The need for technical competence

People are entitled to expect basic standards regarding fairness in procedures and a degree of predictability and certainty in the way rules are applied. The legal system is so complex that it needs experts to ensure this fairness and predictability. Lawyers must be able to demonstrate and apply basic legal competence if the legal system is to function efficiently and justly. Legal education, therefore, must be concerned with lawyers’ technical competence. The areas in which judges and lawyers expect law graduates to be competent may differ from those to which law teachers give their major effort or in which the public has the greatest interest. Society has changed significantly, and thus changes in the legal profession should reflect those changes. The profession is different now because it has a wider set of economic, political and social roles. Legal educators at all levels, especially at the level of practical legal training, must ask whether the different sections of the profession need the same intellectual and professional competencies and the same processes of education and training. 

Conclusion

The legal profession is increasingly and arguably becoming the “national profession”. If our society is not meeting our expectations or ideals of justice, this may be due to some failing of lawyers. Justice is more likely to be achieved if lawyers know what justice is, what they may do to achieve it and what they are required by law, professional standards and moral pressures, to do. Since learning is a life-long process, the skills and knowledge of law graduates probably become more homogeneous over time. Graduates of law schools should be taught to develop, immediately on graduation, a higher degree of flexibility, independence and capacity for moral judgment, and a degree of technical competence which is certainly no less than those exposed to more traditional forms of legal education and training. If the law graduate has gained, in the course of one’s legal education and training, greater capacity to do legal work and apply the concept of justice, the community is best served.

God bless!