Samikhsya Bureau
Bhubaneswar: India lacks the jurisprudence to deal with many issues for which the law is yet to come, Orissa High Court Judge Akhaya Kumar Mishra said . Speaking at the 9 th Orientation Programme of the SOA National Institute of Law (SNIL), faculty of law of the SOA Deemed to be University here, Mr Justice Mishra said the reach of judicial intervention has spread to new areas, there was a need for new laws to deal with contemporary issues cropping up in the society.
Giving an example, he said if a woman, pregnant for two months, decides to leave her husband and marry another person, what will be the status of the yet to be born baby? “These are areas for which laws have to be framed to deal with futuristic requirements,” he said adding as society was changing fast, new laws would have to be enacted to keep pace with the transformation.
Prof. P.K.Nanda, Dean (Research and Development) and acting Vice-Chancellor of SOA, presided over the function attended by the new batch of students and their parents. Pointing out that the legal education had three dimensions, Justice Mishra said the popular perception was that it was an unethical profession. But the truth was that legal education was the only subject which was recognized by the Indian constitution.
Stating that 94 per cent of the population in India was ignorant about the law though ignorance of law could not be an excuse, he said in such a scenario, the legal education provided enough scope to serve the nation. Justice Mishra said at present four crore cases were pending in the courts even as new laws were being enacted and obsolete laws were getting repealed. Gopal Krushna Mohanty, eminent lawyer and president of the Orissa High Court Bar Association, described legal education as a science which imparted knowledge of principles and provisions of law which was interrelated for the development of society.
Mohanty said legal education was first introduced as a subject in the universities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay in 1857 and for the first time students studied law as one of the subjects of instruction, along with others,rather than as a separate field of study. The two year LLB degree was introduced for the first time in 1904 and the first phase of reform of Indian Legal Education began in 1950 when Roman laws were replaced with Indian law and principles of legislation, he said.
